Colony (52 page)

And I went to call Micah and Christina Willis, the sleeping child heavy in my arms, to ask them to open Liberty and see if they could find someone to help me with Darcy in the daytime. And then I went once more to pack. I laid Darcy on the bed beside me as I did, and every time she stirred I sang snatches of nonsense song to her and she mumbled and stretched and slept again, a flushed pixie, a small, tawny animal deep, finally, in the sleep of safety.

I felt a savage rush of love for her, an impulse for her safety so primal and deep that it might have sprung from my womb.

“Going to Retreat,” I singsonged to her under my breath.

“Everything’s okay ’cause we’re going to Retreat.”

Two weeks after she had disappeared, the police had traced Happy to a motel near South Yarmouth, a stale anonymous place with hourly rates and slovenly housekeeping units at the back, overlooking the mud delta of the Bass River. Happy was in one of them, dead drunk at two o’clock in the afternoon, her flesh saffron with old bruises and shrinking off her bones, her reeking clothes lying in heaps on the sticky lino-leum floor entwined with the underwear and soiled blue jeans of a very large man. We never did know who he was; the police thought he must have driven in, seen their car with its blue light spinning, and simply driven out again and away.

The motel manager reported that he never did come back to pay the bill or collect his things. Peter went up to fetch Happy, taking our family doctor with him, but she was in such a state of shouting and thrashing alcoholic dementia that they took her instead to the emergency ward of the Hy-annis medical center. From there, in two days’ time, Peter accompanied her to the small, carefully rustic and stunningly expensive hospital for psychiatric and addictive disorders our doctor recommended in Vermont. She

had been there since, allowed visitors only recently and then only Tommy O’Ryan, who went on Sundays and came back telling us how pretty she looked and how eager she was to please us all and get home to see her baby.

But her doctor there said otherwise; Happy needed long-term psychiatric therapy as well as continuing medical management for her alcoholism, and her support group, as he put it, needed family counseling ourselves so as best to bear her up when she got out. I went dutifully to the earnest young man recommended to us in Boston, with Tommy and Darcy.

Peter had begun his tour by then and refused to curtail it to join us. I could not really blame him; when he had found her, Happy was so abusive to him, physically and verbally, that he could not, even now, speak of it.

“But it’s you she needs most, Mr. Chambliss,” the young psychiatrist said to Peter on the phone after our first visit.

“It’s you she’s looking for in all those beds and bottles.”

“I devoutly hope for all your sakes that she will think to look elsewhere,” Peter said from Washington, where he was speaking that evening at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

“Send your bills to my office in Northpoint; my secretary will see that they’re paid.”

Across the doctor’s office I heard him slam the telephone down, and I stifled the impulse to laugh, inappropriate as I knew laughter was at that moment. I could tell from the doctor’s pale face that Peter had been using what we always called the official Chambliss voice. Few souls prevailed against that. It was not suggested again that Peter join us for counseling.

And so we went, all that spring and early summer, hearing about childhood traumas and repressed sexuality and re-gressed ego states and alcoholic psychosis, and still Darcy started and clung to me, her huge gentian eyes almost white-rimmed, her red-gold curls seeming the only living thing in the whiteness of her too-thin little face.

She had been toddling when I arrived, but she soon stopped that and began creeping about on her hands and knees, and the fluid, joyous, birdlike chatter I was used to hearing slowed to whimpers and then to silence. I would have taken her away long before, since her father spent so little time with her and we two were alone in that dark little house, but the doctor said she needed the continuity of familiar surroundings more than anything.

“The surroundings she’s familiar with would oppress Old King Cole,” I said to Peter when he called that night. “I’m taking her to Retreat in the morning and the hell with continuity. Tommy professes to be concerned about it, but even I can hear the siren call of McNulty’s tavern down on the docks through his protests. To hell with all of them, Peter.

She needs Retreat and so do I. And I’ll bet you do too. When can you come?”

“Oh, Maudie, not for a while,” he said, and I thought he was truly contrite. “Martin wants maybe another month; they’ve asked me to do a southern leg, and I really ought to.

The scholarship is almost assured. And after that, a city or two in Canada—”

“Oh, Peter,” I said softly, disappointment searing me. I had seen us all together so long in my mind, playing on the beach with Darcy or sailing with her, her little head aflame in all that blue.

“But I promise I’ll come when I can,” he said hastily.

“Listen. How’d you like to meet the President? Not to mention Jackie?”

“Peter! When?”

“Sometime around Christmas; Martin says JFK wants us to come to one of the state to-dos during the holidays. Dinner and a concert or something. I

said I’d love to, but of course I’d have to coax you.”

He laughed. He knew I loved the tall young President with a fierceness to match that red head, and my joy and pride in him had gotten me into not a little hot water at Boston and Northpoint dinner parties, where Republicanism flourished like tomatoes around a hog pen, as Aurelia used to say so long ago on Wappoo Creek.

I laughed too.

“Boy, are you going to have to dish out for a new dress,”

I said. “Okay. We’ll see you when we see you. But August, Peter. By August. Promise.”

“I promise, Maude,” he said.

Retreat did, indeed, start to work its magic on Darcy from almost the instant we arrived at Liberty. Micah had engaged Caleb’s capable wife, Beth, to mind her in the mornings and early afternoons, on the condition that small Micah Willis III could come along, and from the moment Darcy laid eyes on that square, brown, darting three-year-old the healing began. Darcy stretched out a finger from the safety of my arms and touched his nose and said, “Funny,” and both children stared at each other and then began to laugh, that glorious, froggy belly laugh of childhood that sweeps everything before it into joy. After that, her robust bloom came creeping back, and she began to walk and then to run after him wherever in Liberty and on the lawn and beach and down at the yacht club that Beth took them, and in the space of two days they were inseparable, almost twinlike in their closeness.

“I never saw anything like it,” I said to Micah on the afternoon of the second day, when he came to pick up Beth and little Mike. “She’s as shameless as a camp follower. Oh, Micah, this is such a place for children; I wish every child could have a dose of

Retreat. It’s practically healed her already, when nothing else we or the doctor did helped.”

I knew he would understand my allusion. I had told him about Happy and our visits to the family counselor when I called, and he had merely snorted.

He looked speculatively at me, now, and I read something in his dark face that stopped my tongue. I waited. He did not speak.

“What’s bothering you?” I said finally.

“Nothing that won’t wait.”

“Tell me now. I’ve got Petie and Sarah coming for supper, and whatever it is will just hang over me until I know. Tell me so I can enjoy my evening.”

He sat down on the edge of the kitchen table and picked Darcy up and held her over his shoulder, absently fondling the red curls while she patted him all over, head and face and shoulders, mouth and nose, babbling softly to herself.

“I reckon Petie and Sarah aren’t going to tell you, at least not right off, so I will, because you should know. It isn’t apt to amount to much, but this is a small place…there’s been a smart bit of talk around the colony this summer about last fall. About the hurricane, and Elizabeth and the baby, and all. It’s not so nasty as it could be, but bad enough, and it’s gotten back to Sarah and Petie and the girls. I hear the girls had some things said to them at camp. Petie and Sarah have gotten so they won’t go out, and people have gotten so they’re kind of scared to ask them, thinkin’ they won’t want to come—you know the damn fool kind of social things that go on up here. So now I think Petie and Sarah feel that everybody’s avoiding them. It’s good you’re here. They’ve been holed up in the Little House for two weeks, like they were under siege. Truth is, everybody’d be glad to see them, but I think they’re past seeing that. Nothing you can’t fix, I’m sure.”

My heart dropped coldly, and then anger flared up, red and blinding.

“What talk, Micah? Who started it?”

“Talk about who the baby might favor, and one thing and another,” he said levelly. “You were bound to hear it, Maude, and it was bound to start. Place small as this, and the drama of it, and then most everybody knew about Petie and Elizabeth being up here that time two winters ago, and most of

’em can count. It would have flurried around a little and died out, but Gretchen Winslow got it early from those two little fairies up at the inn—thick as thieves they are this summer, those three; goin’ to open a collectibles shop, I hear—and is amusing herself by keeping it spinning right along. Doesn’t take much, a word here and a little eyebrow raisin’ there. If Petie and Sarah had laughed at her, or told her to shut her face when they first heard it, it’d be over now. But they didn’t.

Just went into the Little House and shut the door.”

“I would like to kill her,” I said, tears stinging. But I did not cry.

“Wouldn’t be a bad thing, actually,” he said. “But you’d do better by getting Petie and Sarah to come out and settle her hash. Wouldn’t be hard to do. They could just have a few folks in and not invite her. I took Petie sailing last week and suggested just that, but I guess by now they’re afraid nobody would come if they asked them.”

“Well,” I said, “I can do better than that. I’ll have a party and ask everybody in Retreat but Gretchen. Every single living soul. A party for—let’s see—Petie’s birthday. An early birthday party. I’ll do it next week. It’s going to be the biggest party anybody ever had in Retreat, and they’re going to talk about it for
years,
and Gretchen Winslow is the only breathing soul who won’t be there. I’ll send the invitations tonight.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Micah said, and began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I glared at him.

“You. You remind me so much of your mother-in-law.”

“Well, thanks so much, Mr. Willis. If I can ever return the favor, do let me know.”

“No, you remember the year she died, when Gretchen Winslow popped off at her and you because you’d brought us to the yacht club, and she asked us to sit on the porch with her in front of the entire colony and took Gretchen’s chairs to boot.”

I began to laugh too.

“Punishment by porch privileges,” I said. “A form of social retribution unknown except to the female of the species.”

“Ayuh,” Micah said. “And the thing was, she didn’t like us worth a damn, but she did it anyway. I guess she figured an afternoon with us was preferable to a minute of Gretchen Winslow’s tongue. Stopped it too, if I recall. Don’t know if it would work now. Gretchen’s acting this summer like she runs Retreat and the village both. No bounds on her tongue.

She’s hurt a lot of feelings. Guess she figures she’s the doyenne.”

“Gretchen has a great deal to answer for,” I said. “And she’s just about to answer to me.”

“Good huntin’, Maude,” he said, and jerked his thumb up in the old World War II airman’s salute, and went out of the kitchen, still grinning.

“Absolutely not,” Petie said that night when I told him and Sarah about the party. His face was mottled with anger and what looked to me like fear. Micah had been right; he and Sarah had not mentioned the talk around the colony, but they were both thinner, and their faces were strained and pale, faces that had rarely seen the sun. I was glad I had sat down to write notes of invitation to the colony the instant Micah and Beth and little Mike left, and had hurried to the post office to mail them only minutes before my children came to Liberty. There was no going back now.

“It’s going to be a wonderful party,” I said. “You’ve never really had a birthday party in Retreat, and you’re the first Retreat baby I know of. It’s past time.”

“It’s monstrous,” Petie said. “It’s a vulgar outrage and worse; it’s a bribe to everybody up here. We’re absolutely not going to consider it.”

Sarah said nothing but looked at me speculatively.

“I think you’ll have to consider it, darling,” I said. “The invitations have already gone out—to everyone but Gretchen, of course; I really didn’t think she’d add a lot to the festivities.”

“Then you’ll have it alone, because we will not come,” my son said, the mottling fading to white.

“Yes, we will,” Sarah said. “Thank you, Grammaude. It’s a lovely idea.”

“Sarah,” Petie began, but she turned on him, her eyes sparkling.

“Hush,” she said. “Don’t you know when your hide is about to be saved?”

Petie hushed. We had a pleasant nightcap before the fire, and I watched Sarah in its light. There was a power about her that I had not seen before, and it eased my heart. Petie might be the undisputed lord of that marriage, but I saw that Sarah had become, sometime during the difficult past year, its rock. I smiled at her and she returned the smile, fully.

“Thank you, and I mean it, Grammaude,” she said softly to me, while Petie hunted for a flashlight to see them down the cliff path to the Little House. “It’s a stroke of genius,” she added, bursting into laughter. “If you’re going to break the rules, break them big. I’ll

remember that. Even if it doesn’t work, this party is the most wonderful go-to-hell thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It will work,” I said, kissing her cheek. “You wait and see.”

“What in God’s name are you thinking about?” Peter said, when I called him late that night. He was in Atlanta and would be heading to New Orleans the next day. His voice was tight and irritable; Peter hated heat.