Colony (48 page)

But it did not move, and we did not either. For a long moment we stared directly into the cold yellow eyes of a great bald eagle, the largest, Micah said later, that he had ever seen, and time and sound and sensation stopped as if all life save that of the eyes had gone out of the world.

The eagle’s head was white and shone in the sun, and in its great hooked yellow beak, almost as long as the head itself, a fish flopped feebly. The eagle turned its head from left to right, regarding Micah and me frozen to the rock, and then dropped the fish over the lip of the enormous nest. It was both wide and deep; it might have sheltered two or more adult humans, but from the shrill clacking clamor from within I knew it sheltered eaglets. I stared, breath still held; a downy head, all gaping yellow beak and pink maw, appeared over the rim of the nest, and another, and another, and the eagle spread its vast wings in a flash of white tail and underbelly and lifted off again into the blue, and we felt on our faces the wind of its passing. In the air above us it screamed, and far away and

below us, the scream of another eagle answered, and the babies’
kik-kik-kik-kik
grew more frantic, and I knew the other parent was on its way to the nest with more food for the young. I laid my cheek against the stone face of the cliff and wept. The surge of joy and strength and fierce, singing love that shook me was nearly monstrous; I could have flown away into the pure air on it as the eagle had, as I had fancied Sarah Fowler doing in the air above the Aerie, all those summers ago. I knew in that moment that I loved this wild place, this Cape Rosier, with a passion and power that was all engulfing and all my own, independent of Peter or Micah or Petie or anyone and anything else on earth. I clung to the cliff and wept, as strong as the rock in that moment, as whole as the island. I knew that I would never leave Retreat.

It never occurred to me that we had been in danger on the cliff face until much later, when Micah told me, tears not yet quite dry on his own face, on the sail home.

After that, the tide of the summer turned toward joy, and in all the summers at Retreat I remember now, that summer of the eagles was, until its end, the most golden.

Just before the Fourth of July, Peter finished his book and sent it to his Boston publishers and received such an enthusi-astic reception from those august personages that I believe he could have flown to Retreat on the wings of their praise.

As it was, he came careening down the lane and into the driveway of Liberty nearly a week early, in a sleek, growling foreign roadster I had never seen before. He slammed to a gravel-spurting stop, took the front steps in one leap, and caught me up from the porch

where I was potting begonias and swung me around like my father used to do when I was a small child. Then, before I could get a word out, he kissed me full on the mouth so hard and long that my breath vanished, and Jane and Fern Thorne, on their way to the tennis courts, clapped, and Phinizy Thorne put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. Peter released me and bowed deeply.

“It’s an Austin Healy,” he said a bit later, showing me the creamy leather interior of the little car. “British Racing Green, they call it. You wouldn’t believe how fast it is, Maude; it’s like driving a missile of some kind. And the way you can feel the road!”

“I can just imagine the way you can feel the roads on Cape Rosier, Peter,” I said, smiling at him. “Sixty-year-old spines are not designed for that.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said. “My spine feels about twenty.

My legs and arms, maybe fifteen. And you wouldn’t believe how young my—”

“No, I probably wouldn’t,” I interrupted hastily, seeing Erica Conant and her bridge club approaching on the lane, bound for the yacht club porch. “But you could probably convince me by showing me.”

“My very deepest pleasure, if you’ll pardon the pun,” Peter said, grinning in the sun of that enchanted afternoon, and I hugged him fiercely, Erica or no Erica. Peter was back, Peter without shadows; all light and as young, to me, as when he had waltzed with me on the moonlit banks of Wappoo Creek.

I did not care to whom or what I owed the gift of this joyous, burning Peter; if it took a successful manuscript or a new sports car or was simply the product of sunspots or positive ions, so be it. Peter for the rest of that summer was Peter as I had always thought he would be, and me with him, when the two of us were finally alone in Liberty, with a purse full of blue days to spend as we wished. I had, I

remembered, looked far ahead out of that early fortress of rules and duties and reprovals and seen precisely this summer.

Looking back, it seemed to me that it never rained, and yet the grass and wildflowers in the salt meadows were more brilliant than I had ever seen them; that it never grew hot and muggy; that the fog never came crawling back to press its hungry face against my window; that the black flies and mosquitoes and no-see-ums never bit. Crystal-blue days followed one another in a stately procession, a string of perfect weather breeders that spun on through July and August and yet never bred any weather but ringing bronze days and star-bright nights. Petie and Sarah came back from Jamaica re-newed and redeemed and closer than ever and opened the Little House, and both Sally and Maude Caroline went happily each day to Yaycamp, and when we did see our son and his small brown wife, it was briefly: for cocktails or a cold Sunday supper or a picnic on one of the inner islands—for that was a summer spent on the water, even for me—and always they were wrapped in a quilt of deep, quiet love and content that sometimes brought tears of thankfulness to my eyes. My boy had weathered his great storm and found his harbor, just as Peter had apparently, found his own. If we owed that to Elizabeth Potter Villiers, Sarah and I, I believe we would both have heaped our gratitude on her red head with no reservations. Whatever had transpired in that cold, awful night scarcely seven months ago, it seemed to have drawn Peter and Petie together as nothing before had been able to do. They sometimes sailed together, far out into the bay, and more than once I saw Peter drop a hand on Petie’s shoulder and leave it, and Petie smile up at him with nothing in his round brown face but simple content. Elizabeth had gone back to France late that past January and moved back into the chateau of her husband; Gretchen Winslow heard it in Paris and told us when she and her children arrived in Retreat. I often thought, that summer, it was Elizabeth’s final and definite leavetaking that so lightened and charged the air around me and mine.

Peter and I roared around the cape in the Austin Healy so often and so giddily that twice the new sheriff reluctantly ticketed us, and once we actually ran out of gas in the twilight atop Caterpillar Hill, where we had gone to watch the sunset over what is still, to me, the most spectacular vista of sea and islands and sky in all of Maine. We were far from home and probably would have spent the night miserably in the Healy, except that Micah and Tina Willis knew where we had headed and came with a full gas can and takeout clams from the Bagaduce Lunch.

“How’d you know it was gas and not some gruesome catastrophe?” Peter asked Micah, for Micah had said that Peter drove the little car like a lunatic out on a pass and refused to ride with him.

“This is not a summer for catastrophes,” Micah said equably. “But it sure was past time for you to run out of gas.”

We saw a good bit of Micah and Tina that summer, sitting before the fire in Liberty and talking and drinking good brandy. Those nights were as comfortable and companionable as they had always been, and if I sometimes thought of that glorious kitchen of the Willises where I had been only once, I put the thought away. Our worlds could not mingle; Tina had told me that. It was enough for me that she and Micah share ours.

We made love, Peter and I, like the insatiable children we had been in those first days in Northpoint; almost everywhere in Liberty we could think of, and once or twice out of doors, on nights when the moon

was down and the wind off the sea was high. I insisted on the wind; the sounds we made were past indelicate and into the fringe areas of obscenity. Always, they finished in laughter. We laughed as we had not since we were newlyweds in Liberty, stifling the rich, vulgar sounds of love from Mother Hannah’s pitch-perfect ears with our hands, blankets, whatever we could reach in that final transport. Once we went upstairs to the little room that had been our first bedroom in Retreat and Peter’s before that, and made love on the spavined little bed, and it collapsed under us as it had threatened to do that long-ago night, and we nearly choked on our laughter. We climbed off the floor and Peter pulled me into the bathroom and threw the musty old Princeton blanket down into the tub, and we did there, those decades later, what we had done on that first night, and finished up as we had then, weak and breathless with release and laughter.

“I’ll never throw that blanket out,” Peter said, sitting naked on the side of the old claw-footed bathtub. “When we’re ninety-five some poor bride of one of our grandchildren will be up here getting it on that blanket, and we can pound on the ceiling with a broom and ask if anybody is sick. What goes around comes around. Lord, Maude, just look at you, an old lady with gray hair, and those boobs and butt are still as round as they were then, and they still bounce like rubber, and you still holler like a Comanche.”

“How perfectly elegant,” I said lazily, stretching out in the bathtub on the ubiquitous blanket, feeling the rich wetness of him still inside me. “And you, my dear old fool, are
years
older than I am, and you still look like a stork with a hard-on. What goes around comes around.”

“Sail with me this summer, Maude,” he had said when he first arrived, and I did. For the first and only time in my life I got up with Peter in the chill dawns and followed him down the echoing steps of the yacht club dock and into the dinghy, and we rowed in that motionless pink mirror water out to the waiting
Hannah.
At first we did not go far out; Peter knew the profound tilting of the deck as the lee rail rode under still sickened and terrified me, and he kept to the shoreline and made only for the near islands. I had told him about the eagles on Osprey Head, and I think he was truly overjoyed that they had come back, but he did not suggest taking the
Hannah
there and, when I did, said only, “It would be a shame to startle them when they’re just getting established. Next summer I’ll go.”

And I knew the healing I had found there would not happen for him and was deeply sad about that. But I did not push it. The one thing Peter simply would not speak of that summer was Sean.

Gradually I grew, if not to like, then to accept the rolling movement of the
Hannah
and the cant of the teak deck, and we went farther out into the glittering bay. Way out on the water, with the shorelines of Rosier and Islesboro and Deer Isle only cloudlike smears on the horizon, it was better for me: the rush of all that wind-scoured blue and white around exhilarated me to near drunkenness, and I could begin to understand the old, old spell that drew Peter out on the sea again and again. With him at my side, it was a fine sorcery.

But alone…I knew that I would always hate and fear the thought of being alone on that sea. Not for Peter; he was as good a sailor as there was on the cape. But for me. For me, to be alone in a boat on the seas of Cape Rosier would be to be alone in the hands of my oldest and most implacable enemy. Even in those light-spilling days of July and August, that sea remained, in its cold heart, my foe.

On a day at the end of August, when the light

around the cape seemed so clear and blue and radiant that the entire world seemed carved of crystal, Peter took the
Hannah
out past Western Island and dropped anchor off Green Ledge. The wind was down and the sun high and honey gold, and the
Hannah
rocked on the empty sea like a cradle. We ate our sandwiches and drank our wine, and then we stripped and made love on the deck, twice and then three times, and I really think if Peter had not braced his bare feet against the coaming we might, the last time, have simply thrashed and rolled into the sea.

“I’m not even going to speculate what anybody sailing past us would think if they’d seen that,” I said, lying still and letting the light breeze dry the sweat off my body.

“Nobody out today but the lobster fleet,” Peter said. “And the natives are pretty pragmatic about this kind of thing. You know the old joke about the lobstermen out off the cape who saw a rowboat pitching like a rearing horse with nobody in it, and when they got closer they looked down and saw Clem and Mary doin’ it, and they just nodded politely and hollered down, ‘Nice day for it!’ ”

We laughed all the way home to Retreat, and when, as we were tying up, stately silver-haired Guildford Kennedy said, from the club porch, “You children been cruising? Nice day for it,” we doubled up on the dock and were unable to speak for a matter of some minutes. “It’s not you, Guild, it’s just…a boring old family joke,” I gasped finally, sure that the unworldly Kennedys would not have heard it. “It was, indeed, a nice day for it.”

“One of the last we’ll have, looks like,” Guild said serenely.

“Saw on the television this morning that there’s a hurricane coming up the coast from North Carolina and Virginia, and it looks like it might smack us one in two or three days. Andrea, it is. The first

one this season. At the very least we’ll get a good soaking.

Not that we don’t need it.”

“I’ve never heard of a hurricane on the Maine coast,” I said, frowning at Peter as we trudged up the lane toward Liberty lugging ditty bags.

“I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen it happen,” he said.

“There’s a theory that we rarely get them because of the Humboldt current, or some damn thing. And the ones we do get land on the open shore. The bays hardly ever get more than a blow; too far from open water, and too sheltered by all the islands. I don’t like to think of the outer islands getting pounded, though, and I hate like hell to see this weather end.

But at least it’ll be easier to leave if the weather’s nasty. I always used to hope for rain on the day we left for home, when I was a kid.”