Colony (63 page)

“
I don’t believe you!
” I shouted.

“I cannot help that,” my grandmother said, and turned and went up the stairs. She was halfway up before I saw her thin shoulders slump. I didn’t care. In that moment I hated her as much as I have ever hated anyone.

We ate our dinner in silence. His absence was stronger, more vivid, than his presence had ever been. He shimmered and danced in the air between us. I did not mention him, did not speak except to reply to the few sentences she directed to me. I tried not to sulk or cry, to keep my back straight and my face calm. Hers was as still as a death mask, and nearly as white. We did not speak of him again. She went to bed directly after the dishes were done, and the moment I saw her light go out upstairs I was out the door and over the wall to Braebonnie.

He was waiting for me by the door. We did not go up to his bedroom then; we simply did it on the floor by the closed door, as if to keep our bodies apart for an instant longer would mean death by starvation.

Only afterward did we go up the black stairs, and only when the door to his little bedroom was closed did he light a small lamp and a cigarette and look at me, smiling slightly. The smile did not reach his eyes.

“You don’t believe it, then,” he said.

“My God, of course not,” I said. “I could never believe such a thing about you. But who on earth could have started it?

It isn’t like Grammaude to be so judgmental. You should stop it if you know where it started.”

“There was a girl in Rome,” he said calmly, and my heart shriveled in pain and fear. “She was at the embassy. But she was twenty-five, not sixteen, and she was a telephone operator, not an official’s daughter. And I never forced her. I told you I don’t do that. I did, however, leave her. She was incredibly jealous and possessive. I cannot abide that. She told me I’d be sorry. Believe me, I am. I was very fond of your grandmother. And I’d be more than sorry to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me,” I said, putting my arms around him.

“We’ll just keep on like this until…until the summer is over.”

I wanted more than anything to say, Until we go away together after Labor Day, but I did not. What he had said about jealousy and possessiveness rang in my ears.

“If you really want to. But you can’t come through the house any more,” he said. “Why don’t you just take the screen off your window and put it back in when you go back? That way you’d be right at the wall and only a few steps from my front door, and you wouldn’t have to go through the house and around it.”

“I will,” I said. “Her room’s upstairs and at the front of the house. She’d never hear me if I went out the window. Aren’t you smart to think of it, and to use this room where she can’t see your light? I wondered

why you picked this little one, with the other big ones empty.”

“It was my mother’s room,” he said. “I liked the idea of sleeping here too.”

Later, when we had made love again and it was almost time for me to go home—there was the faintest hint of lightening in the black over the bay—I said, “Warrie, what did you tell her when she asked you about the story? Did you tell her about the girl at the embassy?”

“Yes,” he said. “I thought she might have believed me, but then she said I mustn’t come for dinner any more, or see you.

She seems to think I’m a danger to you.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I said I was no more a danger to you than my mother had been to her,” he said.

“I can’t understand it,” I said. “Could your mother have been some kind of threat to Grammaude, way back?”

“A girl not yet twenty? I can’t think how, can you?”

“No,” I said. “I really can’t.”

For the next couple of weeks we simply kept on doing what we had all summer. His check did not come but was promised, now, by late August, and so he had little choice but to keep to Braebonnie and work on his thesis. I had little choice but to go about my tasks at the yacht club as if the waiting nights did not sear at me like live coals caught in my clothing.

Grammaude and I ate our solitary dinners and gradually began to resume, at least on the surface, something of a normal relationship; she smiled and talked of her usual summer interests and my next and last year at Saint Anne’s, and what I might like to do after that: what college, what plans for the future. But her voice was frail, and she seemed to fight tiredness all the time, like someone convalescing very slowly from a bad illness.

I answered as lightly and noncommittally as I could, outlining elaborate college and career plans that would never happen, because, of course, I would be somewhere with him.

I never doubted that. We had made no definite plans, but we had talked about it. It was enough to sustain me through anything.

I had broached the subject one night, my heart sick and high in my throat because of the risk I was running. But I could live no longer without knowing that we would go on.

Summer was ending. There was a new slant to the sun now, and the barberry hedge outside Liberty was tinged with red.

I had seen my first ragged V of wild geese against the grape-flushed sky only the night before.

“I saw wild geese going south last night,” I said lightly, lying naked in his dark arms. “You’ll be flying off with them pretty soon. I’ll be a lost sheep when you’re gone.”

“Maybe not,” he said, reaching his dark head down to nibble at my breast.

“Maybe not what?”

“Maybe you won’t have to be a lost sheep.”

“Why? Shall I come to France?”

I said it lightly, but my heart was pounding so hard I thought he would hear.

“You’d hate that, you little puritan,” he said lazily. He put his hand between my legs, and I pressed hard against it.

“Italy, then?”

“That’s even worse.”

“Then how will I not be a lost sheep? How will I see you?”

“I’d sort of thought I might stay over here,” he said. “See something of the country. Maybe finish school somewhere.

I’ve only got a quarter more: that is, if my courses will transfer. How about Atlanta? Have they got good schools in Atlanta? Could I learn

anything that would make me a good living in the land of
Gone With the Wind?
”

“Oh, of course,” I caroled, my heart singing. “Georgia Tech has a great school of finance, and so does Georgia State. We could…you could go to school and I could work and help you finish—” I stopped, reddening. It was a big leap from school in Atlanta to a life shared there.

“I don’t let women support me,” he said. “There are a lot of young French and Italian men like me in New York who do that, just hang around and live on what their women bring home. Eurotrash, I think they call us. I will not do that.”

“It wouldn’t be for long, just until you finished.”

“No. I want you to go on to college and get your degree; that’s a must. That’s not to say I wouldn’t come and be with you while you did it. You just can’t support me. I’ll manage that.”

I heard only the “come and be with you while you did it.”

Joy swept me.

“I was so afraid you thought I was too young or too boring,” I whispered into his neck. “All those exotic foreign women you see all the time.”

“Darcy, you are anything but boring,” he said. “You’re right; I see exotic foreign women all the time. But I don’t often see a living Venus on the half shell. You’re the first.”

“And the last?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Oh, God,” I breathed. “I want…Warrie, let’s tell Grammaude. Let’s go wake her up and tell her. She’ll see that none of it was true, that you had…honorable intentions—”

“No,” he said. “She isn’t going to believe me, Darcy. You’ll have to take my word on that. She’ll send you home—or worse, cut off your trust fund—and I can’t follow until my check comes. Don’t say

anything yet. When the check comes, in September, we’ll tell her.”

I had no trust fund that I knew of, but it mattered less than nothing to me.

“Tell her…what?” I had to hear it.

“Tell her whatever you want, love.”

And so I sat at the dinner table in Liberty and told my grandmother great, sensible, and considered lies and waited for the coming of autumn and the check that would set us free.

In the last week before Labor Day my period did not come.

At first I thought nothing of it; I simply could not connect the absence of that clockwork red tide with what Warrie Villiers and I did in the nights at Braebonnie. Hadn’t I taken the pills? Hadn’t he said it would all be fine?

But I had never been late before. And there was a strange rich feeling in the pit of my stomach, and a kind of quickening when I touched my breasts. Dear God, could I be pregnant?

All the shame and terror that the nuns had implanted in me rose boiling to the surface, but I pushed them down and thought about it. Pregnant. A baby. Warrie’s baby and mine: a small real person with, perhaps, my red hair and his strong features, my white skin and his gypsy’s eyes. A baby, something we had made together that was ours alone, mine alone.

Mine. A very grown-up thing indeed, to have a baby. He would be overjoyed, of course he would. A son. All men wanted a son, didn’t they?

But somehow I did not tell him. The week wore on and my period did not come and I grew surer and surer, and I did not tell him. We made love longer, harder, more often in the nights than ever before, and I did not speak of it.

Labor Day, I thought. I’ll tell him then. After my last day at the yacht club, after his check is here, while Grammaude is packing us up to go home.

We’ll have to make definite plans then anyway. That’s when I’ll tell him.

And on the night after my last day at the club, after the debris of the last regatta had been cleared away and the commandant had given me my last pay envelope, and Grammaude and I had eaten our hasty supper, surrounded by half-packed boxes and suitcases, and she had gone to bed in preparation for our next-to-last day in Retreat, I went out the window and over the wall to Braebonnie to tell my love about his baby.

There was a car in the driveway, pulled around to the front of the house so no one could see it from the lane. It had New York license plates, and it was long and sleek and low, obviously foreign, though I did not know what it was. I saw no evidence of anyone, but the light burned in his bedroom upstairs. Could his check possibly have come and he had bought this sleek machine with it? Where on Cape Rosier could he find such a thing? I knocked, the three knocks that were our signal.

He did not come. I knocked again. He did not come. I knocked and knocked, puzzled, and finally he did come, jerking the door open abruptly. He was damp and naked, and wore a towel knotted around his lean waist. His hair was wet and his face was closed, impatient.

“I got you out of the shower,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I made as if to enter, but he put an arm across the door and stopped me.

“It’s not a good night, Darcy,” he said. “I have company.

A friend from New York, unexpected. I’ll see you…later.

Tomorrow night, maybe.”

“But…I’d love to meet your friend,” I said doubtfully. What was the matter with him? Why was his face so distant and cold?

“I said not tonight. It’s late and I’m tired. Go on home now. I’ll see you when…I’ll see you later.”

“I had something to tell you,” I whispered.

“It can wait,” he said.

“No.”

“Warrie? Where are you? Come back to bed, I’m freezing,”

a voice called down the stairs. It was a woman’s voice. It was, like his, faintly foreign. I looked at him. The world wheeled and rang; my vision blurred.

“I see you know about Eurotrash first-hand,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry you found out. It doesn’t change anything. Go on home. I’ll see you tomorrow; she isn’t staying. She’s just passing through.”

I turned and went back across the stone wall and through the window and sat down on the side of my bed. Zoot made a small trilling sound in his throat, and I picked him up and buried my face in his fur and then put him back down. I sat and watched Braebonnie; in about an hour the upstairs light went off. In another, a fog-white dawn came up over Penobscot Bay. By first light I was halfway across the stretch of shrouded water to Osprey Head. The morning was cold and a wind had come up, stirring the water to a chop. I knew it would be frigid with the coming of winter.

Off the rocky beach I let the sail drop and tossed over my sea anchor. I looked back at the shore and could not see it; I looked down at the cold green water. I could see only a small stretch of it. My little brother had gone into this very water and Grammaude still sometimes wept for him. All right, then. So would I go into it. So, then, might they weep for me. Or not. In that moment I did not care about that or anything else. Taking a great, despairing breath, I dove off the bow into the bay.

It had been my thought, if one could have called it that, to go down and simply let myself drift, so that the cold would take me before the drowning did. I

had heard that in a few seconds one went so numb that there was no sensation but sleepiness, a dreaming green peace.

That was what claimed you, not the choking water.

But it was not true. The water was terrible, fire and pain and darkness and an aching beyond pain. I choked and my lungs seared, and I fought and arched and kicked and knew that this was death, not a green peace, and I feared it more than anything on earth, even the loss of Warrie. I struggled for the surface far above me, hobbled by my wet blue jeans and sweater. Just as I thought my lungs would burst, I gained the surface. The little catboat bobbed, waiting. I swam heavily and clumsily for it and struggled aboard, nearly cap-sizing in the process. Then I set the sail for the yacht club.

As it materialized out of the fog, I felt a terrible cramping begin in the pit of my stomach, and the warm rush on my legs that meant blood, and knew that if there had been a baby there no longer was. By the time I gained the harbor I was shaking all over, so hard that Caleb Willis, who was there alone taking the young Thornes’ catboat out of the water, had to row out and tow me in. It was he who carried me, wrapped in blankets from the club and racked with tremors and sobs, up the lane to Liberty.