Colony (51 page)

“Oh, for God’s sake, Grammaude, of course people will talk; they probably started the day we left last year. The ambulance driver talked, and the doctor talked, and those two adorable innkeepers, and the doctor’s nurse, and the man from the bank who came to get Elizabeth, and maybe even Elizabeth herself; she’d love to get some dirt on us started, you know that. If there’s a person who goes to Retreat left who doesn’t know about it, I’ll be astounded. How do you think that’s going to be for me and Petie and the girls? Even if it doesn’t bother you—”

She stopped and dropped her eyes again. I was looking at her as if to memorize her face, and something in my own must have been difficult to countenance. I could feel the terror and pain and anger looking out of my eyes.

“Then do it for me,” I said, my voice shaking and near to cracking. I could feel tears start down my cheeks. What on earth was the matter with me? Who was this speaking?

“If you won’t do it for yourselves, do it for me. Just…just go! Live! Do whatever you do every summer in Retreat.

Pretend it never happened and people will go along with you; you’ll see! That’s the way it is in Retreat. It always has been. No one is going to so much as mention it—”

“Mention what, Maude?”

It was Peter’s voice, speaking for the first time, and it was soft and conversational and elegant: his public classroom voice. Fear and fury erupted together in my throat.

“That that baby looked exactly like us!” I shouted.

There was silence. They all stared at me, faces white and frozen. I had thought the unthinkable, spoken the unspeakable. On your head be it, then, their eyes said.

“Don’t you see?” I tried to shout again, but my voice was a strangled whisper. “If you don’t go back, all of you, and go for the whole summer, it’s over and you can never go back again! And then it will have been for nothing, all of it.”

“All what?” Peter said, again in the pleasant schoolroom voice.

I will not say it, I thought. You cannot make me. Anger flooded me, drowned me.

“God
damn
it,” I shouted. “All this garbage about yourselves. About your pain, your tender feelings, your can’t-bear-thises, and nothing-left-thats.
What about me?
You’ve never once in all your lives, any of you, asked me what I wanted! I gave up a whole…a whole
life,
a whole
world,
and I came up here and worked like a slave and waited for years to make Liberty and Retreat a place where…where we could all be together and be
safe,
our place, the
Chamblisses’

place…and now I’ve come to love it more than any other place on earth, and you’re all prepared just to throw it away over one night out of one year in all your lives.
Do it for me!

If you can’t see that it’s for you, then
do it for me!
Maybe you’ll come to see later that it was for all of you, all along.”

I fell silent, because I had run out of breath. My head spun and my ears rang. How’d you like
that,
Mother Hannah? is the only clear thought I can remember. I looked down at my plate and waited for what would come.

Petie was the first to speak. It seemed a very long time before he did. Coolly, coolly.

“Then of course we’ll go in early June as we always have, Mother, and stay until the day after Labor Day. We had no idea you felt that we…did not think of you.”

“Of course,” Sarah murmured. “Forgive us for distressing you.”

I have behaved abominably, and they truly hate me for it, I thought bleakly, but I could not apologize. I must not let up on this.

I lifted my eyes to Peter, who had not spoken.

“I will come,” he said, “in August, as soon as the last speech is over. I can’t refuse to tour, but I will come as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” I said. “All of you.”

And I got up and began to clear the table. The ugliness of that Easter meal would live with all of us, all the days of our lives. There was nothing I could do about that.

As they were leaving, Sarah pulled me aside, in the foyer.

“I want you to know, Grammaude,” she said, her voice trembling, “that we will come to Retreat as long as Petie wants it, and we will stay as long, each time, as he wants.

But after you are gone I will never set foot there again. Petie may if he wishes, but I will not. Your precious Liberty can be sold to a tribe of aborigines as far as I’m concerned, and will be, if I have anything to do about it. So you may as well plan to leave it to somebody else. I don’t know you any more; you’ve turned into…you’ve turned into Mother Hannah! And if you don’t remember how she treated people, especially you, her daughter-in-law…well, I do. I remember.”

And she turned and followed Petie and her daughters out into the tender green afternoon.

After they had gone, Peter kissed me briefly on the forehead and went into his study and closed the door. I was in bed, the lights out, long before he came into the bedroom. I think that neither of us slept. In the morning, everything was as it had been all year: pleasant, suspended, smoothed, and even.

I had, I sensed, somehow won the victory of my life, but I did not feel remotely as a victor should. Only a trifle guilty at making a scene (but really not very guilty at all); only dull and heavy. And underneath it, still, the quelled panic, waiting.

The panic that should have abated but had not.

It came to me as I worked in the tulip bed one afternoon in early May, clearly and roundly and seemingly out of the air, that the source of that deep-buried, seeping fear was Sarah’s words in the foyer on Easter afternoon: “After you are gone I will never set foot in Liberty again.”

Who, then? Who would take up our standard in Retreat?

For whom would I keep Liberty in trust, to whom would I teach those narrow life-giving rules? Not Happy; my poor wounded and wounding Happy could never be a chatelaine, even of her own life. Who?

I threw down the trowel and sat down directly on the still-cold earth and squinted up into the sun, and it was as if the answer was there, burned into the heart of brightness: Darcy.

Somehow, I would bring Darcy Chambliss O’Ryan to Retreat each summer and give her the whole gift of it, and she would give it the whole gift of herself. It was purely a deliverance.

I laughed in the sun at the simple rightness of it.

And as if summoned by an epiphany, a call came the next evening from Tommy O’Ryan in Saugus. Happy had left that morning, taken a bag and some clothes and all the money in the emergency cash envelope and simply…gone. It was the first of the disappearances that were to mark the rest of her life, but no one knew that then; Tommy was truly dis-traught and had begun calling all Happy’s sparse acquaintances and haunts in the neighborhood. He would contact the police next. In the meantime, could I possibly come?

Huge, shambling Florrie Connaught, Happy’s confidante and household helpmate, was gone too—undoubtedly with Happy—and there was no one to stay with Darcy.

“My job’s hanging by a thread, Maude,” Tommy said heavily. “I can’t miss any more time. We’ll be done for if I lose this one. I’ll find somebody for the

baby as soon as I can, but until then could you—”

“I’ll be there in the morning,” I said. “Don’t worry about the baby. Just concentrate on Happy and your job.”

“Bless you, Maude,” Tommy said.

Peter sat beside the fire in our bedroom that night, sipping scotch, as I packed. He said little, but it was clear that he was deeply disturbed and unhappy at my going to Saugus.

Finally I stopped folding clothes and came and put my arms around him from behind and kissed the top of his fair head. I could feel his cool white scalp with my lips now; when had that happened?

“It might help if you talked about it, darling,” I said. “We’ve turned into the original family of monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. How can I not go? That little girl has never had any stability to speak of in her life. Tommy says she’s cried for her mother all day. It’s only going to make it worse if he brings in a stranger to look after her.”

“I know,” he said. “We’ve got to do right by this child. It isn’t that. It’s Happy. I think—Maude, sometimes I’m so terribly afraid that I’ve passed something…dark and sick and fatal…on to her. You know how my father was, those times he went away. I know I’ve got that same thing in me; sometimes the world just looks dead to me, finished and cold, and I have to get away from it—and I wonder, what if it’s on its third generation now, in Happy, only in her it’s growing into a real madness, real illness? The seeds have always been there in her, you know that. I know you think that spell she had after Darcy was born was mostly hormones, but I’ve always felt there was something else.”

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath, for the same fear had plagued me since Happy’s hospitalization, “we’ll just have to deal with it. Find the right kind of

doctor for her, or medication, or hospital, whatever it takes, or take care of her ourselves if Tommy can’t. Keep Darcy with us, if it comes to that.”

He reached up and covered my hand with his, still looking into the fire.

“My tough little girl. My tiny titan,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “You’ve always been the staunch one, Maude; throw the book at you and you come out fighting. And I’ve always let you and leaned on you. We all have.

You were right to lambast us the other day. But a real madness…could you handle that?”

“Of course,” I said. “If I had to. And so would you.”

“My God, though, Maude, craziness…madness…it’s always seemed so abhorrent to me, so awful, so final. And to think I might be some kind of carrier—”

“Peter,” I said, “many other things in the world are worse than madness. Any Southerner knows that. We’re comfortable with eccentricity and craziness; most of us lived with it in some form or another for years. We don’t lock our crazy folks up in the South. It’s a rare family that doesn’t have a strange aunt flitting around the top story, or a notorious drinking uncle, or a cousin or grandpa who preaches on street corners, or an odd nephew at the table on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s sad to us, but it’s not tragic, and it surely isn’t shameful. We work it out and take care of our own. And so will you and I, if there’s anything badly wrong with Happy.”

He laughed.

“The thought of the Stallingses or Guild or Dierdre Kennedy preaching on street corners is past imagining,” he said.

“Well, just because they don’t think there isn’t strangeness and trouble and pain in their families,” I said.

“No,” Peter said. “I’m sure sad and scandalous

things happen everywhere. But they don’t seem to happen in Retreat.”

And I knew then that for Peter the stormy night last September would never end, never be eased or mitigated.

His terror and disgust at madness and outrage went too deep, and his horror at its happening in his own family in that place of his perfect boyhood was insurmountable.

“Then Happy will simply not come to Retreat if and when she’s out of control,” I said. “I know what it means to you.

I’m not going to let it be spoiled.”

“I’m going to miss you more than I can tell you,” Peter said, and got up and drew me into his arms, and we slept that night enclosed in each other, seeds in a single pod, two halves of a whole. I lay awake after he had fallen asleep, and it seemed to me that our very breaths slid together, as if one entity lay sleeping in the old bed with the pineapple finials that had been my mother’s, that I had brought from Charleston. We had slept that way from our very beginning, Peter and I.

I stayed in Saugus until near the end of June. After the first week or so it was agony for me. Tommy O’Ryan worked late most nights, and the little house was dark and soiled with a kind of effluvium of the soul that resisted all my attempts to scrub and air it away. And the thin, ferret-faced neighbor woman Tommy found to help me with Darcy proved to have a spirit to match her demeanor. Millie Leary was sly and in-gratiating with me and virulently curious about my clothes and the books I read and my life and family; she was also as God-ridden—or perhaps I should say God-riddled—a human being as I have ever known and justified herself with the holy Bible, the passage about sparing the rod and spoiling the child, when I caught her slapping Darcy smartly across the face for upsetting her orange juice for the second time that morning. Darcy was cowering in her high chair, white-faced except for the red imprint of Millie Leary’s hand and silent as a stone. That was the final horror to me; a fifteen-month-old child should be shrieking her lungs out in outrage and pain if slapped. But Darcy rarely cried or spoke.

Mostly she clung. I fired Millie Leary on the spot and stood in the doorway with Darcy pressing into my neck while she went, fairly spitting with virtuous fury. And then I called Tommy O’Ryan at his job, something I would ordinarily never think of doing, and said, coldly and without preamble, “I want you to tell me if anyone is in the habit of striking this child.”

His beautiful Irish voice began its familiar cajoling carol of denial and then, abruptly, stopped. We listened for a moment to each other’s breathing.

“Happy does sometimes, I think, Maude,” he said. “Not when I’m around, of course, but I’ve come in when Darcy was still crying a little, and there was…maybe a wee mark or two on her face. But,” and he added it hastily, as if it explained everything, “only when she’s had a mite much to drink. When she’s sober and I tax her with it, she cries as if her heart would break. Ah, Maude, things are going to be different when she gets home this time. I know it. She’s a good girl, our Happy. You know that.”

I put the telephone down without answering, my heart jolting with anger, and sat and rocked Darcy until she loosened her deathlike grip on me and slackened into sleep.

And I thought, I’m going to take her to Retreat tomorrow, and I don’t care what Tommy or Peter or that muddleheaded doctor say. She is not staying another night under this roof, nor am I, and I am not at all sure she ever will again. Not until I am sure past any human doubt that Happy will never strike her again.