Colony (44 page)

“Now go with Maude,” Peter said in a normal voice. “And stop this foolishness.”

She stared at him for a long time, her chest heaving, and then turned and came to me and put her hand into mine and stood waiting.

“I should go to Amy,” I said.

“No,” Peter said. “Better let me do that. You’ll want to remember her the way you said you saw her this summer on the beach, laughing in her red hat. Not like this.”

“No,” I said. “Not like this.” And I took Elizabeth’s hand and led her upstairs, so blinded by tears that I had to grope my way along the banisters with my free hand. I have always been grateful that Peter spared me that last sight of Amy Potter. He told me much later it was dreadful, but he never elaborated.

It was a very long day, endless. While Elizabeth dressed I went up to the nursery on the third floor and woke Warrie Villiers’s mamselle and told her what had happened, and waited while she fluttered and chattered in her rapid-fire French, no doubt imprecating these barbarian New Englanders who had the audacity and sheer bad manners to die while she was under their roof. When she had dressed herself in layers of black silk and gone in to see to her small charge, I went back down to the second floor

and looked in on Elizabeth. She was fully dressed, in a short, simple column of cream jersey that looked as if it had been poured over her from a pitcher, but she stood in her stocking feet, holding her pale kid high heels in one hand, staring out over the bare traceries of the treetops of Beacon Hill. I could hear that she was humming, tunelessly, and shut the door softly so that I would not disturb her and went in search of Parker Potter’s room. I found him lying naked on his back, covers spilled onto the floor, motionless and pale and distended as a bloated fish in a tide pool and breathing with such stertorous gargles that I thought he too might be dying. An empty bottle of cognac lay on the beautiful thick carpet, stained now with the dried blood of many such bottles. The room smelt powerfully of liquor and sickness and unwashed body, and I walked back out and closed the door. Peter or some male relative was going to have to deal with Parker Potter. I knew I was looking my last on him, and that forever after that when I thought of him, it would not be that grinning, sly-faced young man with the flying red hair I had first met, but this husked, living corpse.

“Goodbye, Parker,” I whispered, and went downstairs, where Peter was settling in at the tall Hepplewhite secretary for the first of the telephoning.

“You can count Parker out,” I said. “Someone’s going to have to put him in the hospital. I don’t think he can get through today, much less a funeral.”

“Dear Jesus,” Peter said wearily. “What on earth is going to become of them? Who’s going to look after Elizabeth and Warrie?”

“I suppose we could take them back with us for a while,”

I said reluctantly.

“No,” Peter said, not looking up from his list. “That’s not a good idea. Some of Amy’s people will be here soon, or Parker’s.”

“But Peter, I don’t think she even knows any of her relatives,” I said. “She’s been away since she left school. I never heard of any who were close to her.”

“We are not an option for Elizabeth,” he said, and something in his voice told me to drop it. I did.

A stooped old doctor came soon, and went into the den where Amy Potter lay, and came back out shaking his head.

“Aneurysm, sure enough,” he said. “May have been there all her life. I’m sorry. I loved Amy Potter like a daughter.”

And after he had been up to see Parker, he shook his head again and said, “I’m admitting him to Silver Hill this afternoon. The daughter signed the consent forms. It’s very likely he won’t come out. And he may never know Amy is gone.

Will the daughter be staying on here, do you know? If she is, she’ll need to see about setting up some kind of permanent arrangement with them for maintenance…”

“I doubt if she’s up to that,” Peter said. “When his brother and sister get here I’ll turn things over to them; for now, I’ll take responsibility for whatever has to be done. Our families were old friends. I’m Peter Chambliss—”

“Know who you are.” The old man smiled. “Got a little dab of this and that stashed in your father’s bank. I’ll tell the hospital and Fitzgerald’s and the Silver Hill people to talk to you.”

All that day people came in and out of the narrow old house, while the pale lemon sunlight of that cold December gradually faded and snow clouds gathered. The dark, defer-ential young men from Fitzgerald’s came and took Amy quietly away with them; I took Elizabeth into the kitchen, while they did that, and watched her pick at the toast and coffee a weeping cook prepared. Small Warrie, looking very French and formal in dark short pants and knee socks and a dark jacket, hovered silently beside his mother, his hands always somewhere on her flesh, his dark, slanted eyes fastened on her face. He was polite and silent and only spoke once in my hearing: “Are we going back to Paris, then, Mama?”

“No, hush, I don’t know,” Elizabeth said, smoking one cigarette after another, her eyes roving restlessly.

“Is it the end of our money?” he said.

“Certainly not, Warrie, don’t be tiresome,” she said dully.

“Grandpa and Grandma have lots and lots of money. We certainly won’t starve.”

“But who will write the checks now that Grandma is dead?”

“I said we’ll be all right. Go somewhere with Mamselle, why don’t you? Go to…oh, go to the park. Ride the swan boats.”

“Mama, it’s cold out there.”

“Then go upstairs and listen to your records! Mama is tired of your chatter and she is sad! Don’t you know that Grandma is dead?”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” the boy said softly, and my heart hurt for him. There must seem nowhere in this tall dark house—indeed, in this whole strange country to which his mother had fled with him—where a thin dark boy with too-old eyes was welcome.

“Maybe, when things calm down a little, you could come and play with my grandchildren,” I said. “They live not far from here, out in Brookline. You met them last summer, up at your grandmother’s house in Maine.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished them back. The likelihood of Sarah allowing Elizabeth Potter’s child to play with small Sally was practically nonexistent. I had simply, in my fatigue and grief and pity, forgotten all that lay between Elizabeth and Petie.

“I really doubt that Sarah would find that appropriate,”

Elizabeth said, and even in her distraction and grief she smiled with something near enjoyment.

“I thought that boy fell into the water,” Warrie Villiers said.

“Mother said he did, and I would not see him any more.”

“That was my other grandchild,” I said through pain. “I have two more.”

By late afternoon all the Potter and Bartlett kin were gathered in the drawing room, and arrangements for a quiet funeral were under way. Elizabeth sat in her cream and gold, nestled as close to Peter as she could get, and listened remotely as the talk of the orderly tending of the privileged dead washed around the room. Night drew down, and the old servants closed the curtains and brought the drinks tray and answered the softly chiming doorbell, to receive the cards and armfuls of hothouse flowers and the occasional friend close enough to mingle with the family. To all of them, Elizabeth bent her sleek red head and murmured her thanks and suffered her high cheekbones to be kissed, and said no, she did not yet know what her plans were, and yes, it was a mercy her mother hadn’t suffered. She did all this from Peter’s side. When he got up to go into the kitchen, she followed him; when he went into the downstairs bathroom, she followed him with her eyes. After several hours of this, I saw eyebrows began to rise and a few swift looks exchanged among the women, and once I interrupted a whispered conversation in the conservatory. Weariness and a kind of dull resentment weighed me down. We had been up all night and all this day; both of us needed sleep. We needed to get out of this dim house of death and go out to Petie and Sarah in Brookline and sleep long and deep in the vast upstairs bedroom they kept for us. But how to disengage Peter from Elizabeth Potter’s bottomless need?

I was just about to broach the subject aloud when I saw Elizabeth’s head go up, and something like deliverance flare in her brown eyes, and an actual radiance flood her face.

Following her gaze, I saw that Petie and Sarah stood in the doorway to the drawing room in their coats and boots, a powdering of new snow on their shoulders and the soft-footed old butler behind them. Sarah, her dark hair ruffled from the scarf she had flung over it and her snub nose reddened with cold, smiled faintly and waved at Peter and me, and then started toward Elizabeth. Petie stood still, staring across the room at her. I read his face and felt cold fear flood me. It was the old look, the one I remembered from that awful time in their adolescence: pure, naked, living wanting. Elizabeth jumped up from beside Peter and ran past Sarah and her outstretched hands and straight into Petie’s arms, and I saw rather than heard her lips form the words, into his neck, “Oh, Petie, help me,” and felt in my very bones, rather than heard, his answer: “I’m here. I will.”

After that, through that evening and the next day, through the morning of the funeral and the funeral itself, through the small gathering in the town house afterward and the night after that, through Peter’s and my frowning looks and then admonitions and then outright warnings and Sarah’s white-faced silence and then inconspicuous departure from the Endicott Street house, Petie tended his old love with his whole heart and his constant presence, and nothing—not the tears in Sarah’s voice on the telephone that I could not help overhear, not the closed faces and lifted brows of all Elizabeth’s kin, not the hissed, whispering argument with his father that I heard from the kitchen of the Potter house—could move him. When Peter and I went to his and Sarah’s house in Brookline to spend a final night he was not there, and Sarah was shut up in her room and would not talk to us, and when we got up the next morning he had not come in. I got breakfast for the children while Peter, grim-faced, went over to the town house on Endicott Street to have it out with his son, only to find Petie getting into a taxi with a pale, fur-coated Elizabeth and a silent Warrie, and when he asked where they thought they were going, it was Elizabeth who said, “Back to Italy, Peter. Petie is taking us to the airport.”

Petie said nothing at all. Elizabeth kissed Peter softly on the mouth.

“Thank you,” she said. And then they were gone.

Peter came back to the Brookline house to wait for his son, and presently, when Petie got out of the taxi and came into his silent house his round face was so drained and blasted that Peter had not the heart, after all, to excoriate him.

“Sarah is upstairs,” he said quietly. “She’s not in very good shape.”

“I know,” my son said. His voice was dead. “I’m sorry, Dad, Mom. I’m going to fix it now, if I can.”

“Is it over?” I said. I was beyond feeling.

“Yes,” Petie said.

But it was not over. Just after the New Year dawned, Sarah called us in Northpoint, her voice so thick with crying that at first I could not understand her, and told us that Petie was up in Retreat with Elizabeth, holed up in Braebonnie. She found out when Micah Willis saw lights in the Potter cottage and called Peter and me to see if we knew who might be in residence there and, failing to reach us, called Sarah and Petie in Brookline and talked to Sarah. Sarah knew instantly and viscerally that Petie was not at an American Bankers Association meeting in New York, as he had said; she called Braebonnie and got Elizabeth Potter, who laughed but did not deny that Petie was with her. Petie himself would not come to

the telephone. He had been gone three days by then. She was certain Elizabeth had been drunk when she called.

“Please, please, Grammaude,” Sarah sobbed. “Please go get him. He’ll listen to you when he won’t anybody else.

He’s drunk, or crazy, or something. If you don’t I can’t stay with him any more, and what will happen to my children?

Please help me.”

We went. There was never any choice about that.

My heart had always lightened as the car turned east from Northpoint, onto the wandering little blacktop that would take us, ultimately, over the border into Maine. But on this bleak, ashen morning it lay stonelike in my chest, as if Peter and I were driving to attend a dying. And perhaps we were, I thought; the dying of my son’s marriage, and his place in the world our family had always known: the world of orderliness and rules, the world of accountability. Outside that world lay wildness. I knew about that wildness, perhaps better than anyone in Petie’s ken, but Petie himself knew virtually nothing of it except those brief years so long ago when he had stumbled after Elizabeth Potter in her molten wake, and he had been burned so badly by it I had thought he abjured it forever. Poor Petie, perhaps he had thought so too. But Elizabeth was wildness itself, and when he had come within her range, even after all these years, she had toppled his towers with one sentence. I had no idea, on that long and largely silent drive through winter-locked Maine, whether I could prevail against that power.

Peter drove steadily, so locked within himself that I rarely spoke to him. What, after all, was there to say? Once, he turned his head to me and said, “What is going to become of our children, Maude? Is all of this our doing? What could we have given them that we didn’t? What can we give them now?”

There had been snow, finally; it lay in great grayblue banks along the highway, where the plows had pushed it, and on fields and rocks and the boulderstrewn shore below the Camden Hills. The islands were all blue and black and white, and the small bays and inlets themselves were blue-shadowed white: ice beneath snow. I have never seen such a blue as the snow blue of Maine. The cold light threw Peter’s face into sharp relief and backlit the networks of fine lines around his eyes and mouth and on his forehead. His fair hair was more silver in that northern light than gilt. Peter was sixty years old that year, and looked to me, for the first time, every moment of it and more. I felt tears come into my eyes.