Colony (45 page)

I had some ideas about what we had not given Happy and Petie and what we might attempt to give them now, but I did not speak of them. Now was not the time, not with the man I loved most and longest in the world beside me in his pain and defeat. If we could win Petie back, then would be the time for Peter and me to talk of compensatory palliatives for him. As for Happy, I did not think anything could heal or change her. I reached over and touched Peter’s cheek.

“There are a great many things our children must do for themselves, that they have not or cannot do yet,” I said. “They either will or they won’t. Don’t go borrowing guilt, darling.”

“I wonder if anything could have made a difference to Elizabeth,” he said.

“Nothing but Parker, and it’s decades too late for that,” I said. “Peter, dearest, when we have Petie back—and we will—you’re going to have to cut Elizabeth loose from our family. There isn’t any help for her in us, and there’s nothing but grief for us in her. You do know that, don’t you.”

“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “I know that.”

We came to South Brooksville at midafternoon. A new little inn had opened there the summer before, and though it was closed in the winter months, Peter had called ahead and obtained the promise of a room to be opened for us and a fire lit in the fireplace. The innkeepers, an interchangeable pair of chic middle-aged men in narrow blue jeans and sweaters that spoke of Abercrombie and Fitch, said our room was at the top of the stairs, there was a space heater and some additional quilts, and we might share their early breakfast of tea and toast but no other food could be provided. They were, they said, on their way to an estate sale in Castine and would see us, perhaps, in the morning. Otherwise we could leave payment on the kitchen table.

“Are you always so trusting?” I said pleasantly.

“Hardly ever,” one of them said. “In fact we wouldn’t have opened for you at all except that Micah Willis came by and put a deposit down. Everyone around here knows the Willises.”

“Most know the Chamblisses too,” Peter said tightly, and the pair tossed their heads in tandem and went out, leaving us to the chilly comfort of a small, low-ceilinged room with a sputtering fire, three thin gray blankets, a scuttle of coal on the hearth, and a bathroom at the opposite end of the hall.

But the view out of the small-paned window over Bucks Harbor was breathtaking, a woodcut in blacks and grays and smoke blues and the white of fine rag paper. A white ghost of a quarter moon hung in the tender blue over Harbor Island.

“Cold Comfort Farm,” Peter said, piling coal onto the fire.

“I’d counted on something hot to eat. We’ll just have to nip instead.”

And he produced a bottle of good old brandy from his suitcase, and poured some for me into the toothbrush glass, and took a neat swig himself from the

bottle. I sipped, and warmth curled into the cold hollow at my core.

“I’ll bet Tina and Micah would feed us,” I said. “I’ll call them from downstairs. We can’t go over to Retreat on empty stomachs. Lord, Peter, it’s a totally different world, isn’t it?

I didn’t expect it to look like it does in the summer, of course, but this is…implacable. Outside human ken, somehow. It’s almost frightening.”

“It’s beautiful,” Peter said, staring out at the fast-falling blue dusk. “I never thought much about insulating the cottage before, but it would be something to be able to stay up here occasionally in the winter. The Potters used to do it, you know.”

I thought of Braebonnie, and how it must look in all that empty blue: a lightship, a fortress lit against the cold and endless night. A fortress where two errant children played corrupted games in a world of pure inhuman white….

“We should go,” I said. “We’ll stop at the Willises on the way. Let’s just get it done.”

“I don’t want you to come with me, Maude,” Peter said, not turning from the window. “I want you to stay here where it’s warm, at least until I see the lay of the land. I want to handle this myself; I’ve let you carry the load with Petie far too long. This may be very unpleasant, and it’s mine to do.”

“Do you think I’ve never handled unpleasantness?” I cried, stung. “He’s my son; I know him better than anyone else—”

“Precisely,” Peter said. “He is now going to get to know his father.”

“Are you going to be hard on him?” It was a stupid thing to say. Did I expect that we were up here to coax and coddle Petie home?

“Hard enough to get done what has to be done,” Peter said.

“Hard enough so that he knows once and

for all that I care very much what happens to him. Don’t fight me, Maude. I’ll call on you if I need you.”

“All right,” I said weakly, suddenly hating the thought of the empty hours ahead of me in that stark room, hung in the air over no landscape that I knew. And then, “But let me call Micah. He could go with you.”

“No.” Peter looked levelly at me, two hectic red spots on his high cheekbones. “He could not. Call him if you like; he and Tina will give you some supper. But I don’t want Micah Willis to help me get my boy home.”

He kissed me on the cheek and went out the door and closed it. I heard his footsteps echo on the old steps, and the front door of the inn open and shut again, and, in a moment, the car engine start. And then there was silence. I brought the brandy bottle and glass and put it on the bedside table, and wrapped myself in the three blankets, and stretched out on the bed to read my paperback and wait for my husband to bring my son to me. I have seldom felt so alone in my life.

I have seldom felt so heavily, hopelessly sad.

I must have dozed, despite the discomfort of the thin mattress and the scratchy blankets, because when the knock at the door waked me, the fire had all but burned itself out, and the square of the window was full black and pricked with stars. The room was cold; the floor numbed my stockinged feet as I ran across it and threw the door open. Peter, I said with my heart and head, but it was not Peter who stood in the door. It was Christina Willis, and she was smiling and holding out her arms. I ran into them with a little wail of disappointment, mingled with sheer gratitude at her solid, comforting presence. Her heavy sheepskin coat was cold from the night air, and her cheek, as she pressed it to mine, was icy, but her arms and voice were warm.

“I’m some mad at you for not letting us know you were here,” she said, pulling me up to the guttering fire. “Sitting in the dark and cold when I’ve had a leg of lamb roasting for you and Peter for hours, and good red wine open…. Come on, get your coat and boots and let’s get out of this disgraceful garret and home by the fire. I wonder those two fancy boys ever make a dime, the way they treat their guests.”

“Tina, I can’t leave, Peter could be back any minute—” I began, and then stopped. How much did she know about what was transpiring at Braebonnie, or how much had she guessed? There was little that Micah and Tina Willis did not know about us by now, but this…this was a special pain, a special shame. I did not think Peter would want me to speak of it.

She looked at me, her smooth face as serene as ever, but her eyes were soft with pity.

“Peter called Micah a little while ago,” she said gently. “He asked us to come get you and give you some supper and a bed for the night; he’s going to stay at Braebonnie until morning. I gather Petie is…he doesn’t want to leave, and Elizabeth is pretty drunk and near hysterical. Peter said he could handle it, but it’s going to take a good while yet.”

“Oh, Tina, I’ll have to go,” I cried, reaching for my coat.

“No. He said absolutely not. He made us promise, Maude.

And we agree, Micah and I. It’s no place for you tonight.

What needs to be done in that house needs to be done by Peter and his son. Please let it be that way.”

I started to flare up; what did she know of me and my son, of the long bond between us and the pain of this terrible winter rendezvous? And then I thought of the years of pain that she and Micah had borne while Caleb wandered in his own wilderness, and of the hard peace to which they had won through. Christina Willis knew. Tiredness and a kind of heavy peace flooded into me.

“All right,” I said. “Okay. I’ll be very glad to get out of here.

I’ve felt like the Snow Queen in her prison, up here above all the cold and the blue.”

“I feel that way from November to April.” She laughed, and we went out together into the vast night.

Tina and Micah Willis lived in a neat, pretty Dutch Colonial directly on the road a half mile above the entrance to Retreat. Behind it lay a garden and salt meadow, snow-covered, and then a small stand of fir and birches, and beyond that the boathouse and the beach and the bay. Everything was silent, silvered by the thin young moon.

I had always wondered about the houses of the natives of Cape Rosier; with all the empty and spectacular shoreline, they invariably sat within three or four strides of the pitted blacktop road, with their great barns connected by covered walkways beside or behind them. But on this night I understood. The new snow, three or four feet deep and even more where it drifted against houses and piled stone walls, was impassable except where it had been shoveled. No one down on the shore, once snowed in, could dig their way to the road. They would be imprisoned until a plow could come, or a thaw. I thought of the narrow lanes of Retreat and wondered if two cars sat on the road in the moonlight, at the entrance by the weathered oar, and if two sets of footsteps had broken the diamond-white surface of the snow, along with those of partridges and foxes and hares, until this last fall had buried them? How would Peter get in?

As if in answer to my unasked question, Christina said, “Micah took Peter in on Caleb’s old snowshoes. He’s okay.

Micah came back as soon as he saw Peter clear the porch.

He’s going to send Enoch Carter with the plow in the morning. Then they’ll all be able to come out.”

“
Will
they all come out, do you think, Tina?” I said.

“Oh, ayuh,” she said calmly. “I reckon they will.”

“There’s not much you don’t know about us, you and Micah. I wonder sometimes you bother with us.”

“You’re worth bothering about, Maude. You’re one of the few who are,” Tina Willis said, smiling at me. She must be older than me by a decade, at least, I thought, but in the green light from the old Volvo’s sturdy dash I could see clearly the young wife I had first known, the fair girl, as placid and deep as a pond of clear water, that Micah Willis had married.

“If you can say that after tonight, you’re a better woman than I would be,” I said, sudden bitter tears in my nose and throat. “My son isn’t much of a man tonight.”

“My son is alive because of you,” she said. “He had his bad patch, just like your Petie is having, and he found himself a snug harbor. But he wouldn’t have been alive to do it if you hadn’t been there the day he cut his foot so fierce. It’s not the least of the reasons I think you’re worth bothering about, but it’s the first. I think you may be the only ones of the summer complaints I do think that about, though, you and Peter. There were a few others, but mostly they’ve died.”

I reached over and squeezed her hand on the wheel, and she took it off and squeezed mine back. The door of the great barn was open and we drove in, and she shut the door and we ran through the dark connecting hallway, piled with boots and snowshoes and trunks and lawn furniture, and into a great terra-cotta-tiled kitchen where a fire roared on an open hearth, and cherrywood chairs stood around a polished table in the center of the room, and a deep-cushioned sofa and chairs made a grouping in a corner by the fireplace, and Micah Willis in a handsome icelandic sweater and corduroys stood at a modern range carving a crusty brown joint of lamb into thin pink slices. I could have wept at the warmth, and the smell of garlic

and basil and red wine, and the sheer dark safe bulk of him.

He held out one arm and I ran into it and he kissed me on the cheek, still brandishing the knife in the other hand.

“Come in the house, summer lady,” he said, in the rich voice that, it seemed, had stood in my ears since last summer.

“Do you know that you’ve never been here before?”

“Oh, Micah, I must have, in all those years,” I said.

“Nope. We always came to Liberty. It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t now; your mother-in-law could only bend just so far. But I’m glad to welcome you. It’s our turn and some past.”

He poured red wine for us into thin old crystal glasses, and we sat on the sofa before the fire and drank it and I looked around the room. It was the room of cultivated people; I had been in many like it at Northpoint and in Boston: rich with books and beautiful, fragile things on shelves, and warmed by firelight dancing on polished old wood and brass and silver. Oriental rugs worn thin and silky stood in pools on the floor, and plants and flowers, kept carefully away from drafty doors and windows, stood on tables and in deep Italian pots. A small spinet stood in a corner, with Christina’s violin lying on top of it, and a good phonograph and what seemed hundreds of records occupied its own wall unit. I remembered that Micah had said that both his and Tina’s fathers had been in the China trade; relics of that rich era stood all about the room. It was much more than a kitchen, it was the heart of this house, and the heart of what was, I saw suddenly, a rich and complicated and very complete life that Micah and Christina lived together. A thing entirely separate from what I knew of their summer lives; another universe entirely. I could not name the feeling that drifted like smoke to the surface of my consciousness: a kind of envy?

A wistfulness?

“This is a glorious room,” I said. “I don’t know why it’s such a surprise: I guess I’m used to thinking of Maine in terms of Retreat, of summer, wicker and rattan and shabby old porches. It’s a very shortsighted way to look at it. I always thought of Retreat as the real world; I’d wait all year, through all the seasons in Northpoint, to get back to the real world.

And I never knew, all that time, that when the summer was over, there was still, for you all…all this.”

“For us,” Christina Willis said, “the real world starts when all of you leave. This is our real world.”