Colony (67 page)

“Thanks,” he said. “I probably won’t come down. I’m going to try and sleep some now.”

He wasn’t on the porch when I brought the pie, and he often wasn’t during that week when I came with food. But he was occasionally, and when he was I would sit and talk a little, and once or twice I made us iced tea in the familiar and yet unfamiliar kitchen and we sat drinking it and looking out at the sweep of sea and islands and sky that Braebonnie commanded. It was a spectacular view; I wished afresh on those evenings that Liberty had that direct water frontage.

But I was glad, too, in a way, that it did not. You would have to live up to that magnificence. Liberty simply let you sag when you needed to.

We talked, on those evenings, of nothing in particular, nothing in the past. We were careful about that. He told me a little about France and Italy in these opening days of the new decade, and I talked a little of Atlanta and the blaring, sun-punished new South. It was light talk, and I did not stay long. Mostly, we laughed. I had not laughed much that summer, and before that, not at all for a very long time. The laughter felt good.

Grammaude said nothing when I left with the plates of food each evening. I know she was uneasy at my going, but I knew too that she would have done it if I had not. It was unthinkable, in Retreat, to let a neighbor lack food because of illness or injury. Mostly, I knew, she disapproved of and somehow feared the laughter. She could not help but have heard it. Her window gave directly onto the piled stone wall and the lawn of Braebonnie. I noticed, each evening as I came back across the stile to dinner, that the shades in her bedroom were drawn once more.

At the end of that week I took her to Donald and Marie Elliot’s enormous lawn party at Fir Cottage. It was the loveliest of a string of preternatural nights. My grandmother’s old friend Erica Conant was gone now, but her legendary rock garden rioted and tumbled

down the cliff face, and her Japanese lanterns, like the ones in Grammaude’s shed, glowed magically in the dark branches of the great firs for which the cottage was named. Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin, and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky over the Camden Hills. I looked at the handsome people in flower prints and linen and madras on the lawn and veranda. How little this place had changed since I was small; how much had happened! It struck me that there should be, in every life, a place like this, a kind of Bri-gadoon, where you could come and visit your past, and the past of your people, and know that whatever happened outside, here timelessness lived. But few lives can claim one. I knew myself blessed, in that moment, by Retreat, and wondered for the first time if perhaps there might be more for me here than the enforced healing of this one summer.

But at the thought the fear, dormant now for weeks, coiled and struck sharply as a snake, and I pushed it away. No. Not for me. Not any more.

I got up and went up to the bar to get Grammaude a refill, and listened closely for the first time in many days to the talk in the group milling around it. Then I began to laugh. I was still laughing when I brought Grammaude her drink and sat back down. She smiled up at me inquiringly.

“Sewage,” I said, motioning with my head toward the bar.

“Everybody’s talking about septic tanks and sewage disposal.

Come to think of it, they’ve been doing it all summer. I’ll bet Retreat is the only place on earth where people routinely talk about shit over drinks.”

Grammaude smiled and looked down into her gin and tonic. Then she looked at me. “Shit, as you put it, is a real dilemma up here. Most of the cottages on our side of the main lane sit on a rock ledge; dig down

about nine inches and you’ll hit it. They can’t have septic tanks in their yards. For more than a hundred years—maybe for as long as the colony has been here—the only septic field available to them has been that big old meadow that runs alongside Liberty and behind Braebonnie down to the water.

We own part of it, and the Potters own the rest—Warrie, now. Both families have always been glad to let the other cottages channel their septic lines there. I don’t know how many do; probably about half the cottages in Retreat. Otherwise, they simply couldn’t be used. You can see that people are concerned about…shit.”

She smiled again and looked away.

“You mean,” I said slowly, “you mean that if…somebody…owned Liberty and Braebonnie he’d—they’d—have the only septic field in this half of Retreat?”

She nodded, her eyes on the bay.

“And if they chose, they could deny all those people the right to use it? But then they couldn’t come here.”

Grammaude said nothing.

“Grammaude, he would not do that,” I said.

She looked at me then, but she did not speak.

“I know he would not,” I said.

“Oh, Darcy,” my grandmother said, and her voice was tired and old. Soon after that we went home.

“He would not,” I said aloud into the salt-cool air that night, after I had turned off my light. And there was such a simple, solid truth to it that I slid immediately into sleep on the hardness of it and did not dream.

W
hen Warrie graduated from his crutches, I borrowed my cousins’ Beetle Cat and took him sailing. It was the first clear day we had had after nearly a week of cold, thick-felted white fog, for the perfect weather had finally broken the day after Donald and Marie’s party, and I was restless and dull-minded and needed the fresh, sharp-edged blue of the sea and sky.

I asked Warrie along because, after being house-bound in the gloom with Grammaude for so long, I needed also to laugh. She had been distant and preoccupied ever since our conversation about the septic field in the great meadow shared by Liberty and Braebonnie, and I had finally given up trying to get back to our old easy footing. In another woman I would have put the silence down to simple sulking because I had defended someone she thought indefensible, but Grammaude did not sulk. I knew she was deeply troubled and strongly suspected that she was trying to decide what to do about my seeing Warrie the little that I did.

I could have put her mind to rest about that, I thought; I wanted only simple lightness and the thoughtless companionship of someone near my own age, after a summer spent with the old. But I did not. For one thing, her unhappiness at the situation made me perversely annoyed; I simply did not want the weight of it on my head, not now, when the years-long cloud of misery and fear was finally giving way to a frail normalcy. For another, I knew on some level that my seeing him had more to it than a way to pass the time. Every woman who has been in love with a man long before and lost him wants to retest those waters when she meets him many years later. She may be supremely happy with her current state of affairs, and usually she has no wish at all to resume the relationship. She simply wants to see if she has the power to make him the slightest bit sorry. I think it is so universal a trait with women as to be genetic. I recognized a small streak of it in myself and did not admire it. So I did nothing to ease her pain. I did not admire myself for that, either.

She hadn’t spoken of Warrie during the week after the party, when I left in the evenings with his supper plate. But when I told her where I was going and with whom that morning, she put down her coffee cup and said, “Oh, darling.

I do so wish you wouldn’t. I know you’re twenty-nine years old and all that, but I didn’t really speak up that last summer, and look what happened. Taking his dinner over to him is one thing, but a day on the water alone is quite another.

You’re still very fragile, and I don’t think you see him plain even now.”

“I see him as plain as day for the rat he was twelve years ago and the ass who’s been annoying you all this summer, and I can handle that as well as you can,” I said a bit sharply, for she seemed very old and diminished that morning, almost as faded and used as

she had when I found her asleep on the sun porch at the beginning of the summer, and that frightened me. I did not want to feel guilty about Grammaude.

“Then why not cancel today? Spend it with me instead of a rat and an ass. We could go somewhere: Bar Harbor, maybe.”

“For God’s sake, Grammaude, we’re only going sailing, not…to a motel or something,” I snapped. “I’m not going to get involved with Warrie Villiers again; I don’t even particularly like him. I just want to spend a few hours with somebody who makes me laugh.”

She turned back to the coffeepot, but not before I saw the hurt in her face. She had made me laugh quite often that summer, so my words were thoughtless and hard. I should have done what she asked; the sail was nothing to me. But I didn’t. I just kissed her wrinkle-etched silk-velvet cheek and said, “Back before drinks time. Want to have Mrs. Thorne and Mrs. Stallings over? I’ll get some crab at the store if you do.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take P. D. James and go back to bed for a little. This is an elephant day.”

A small dart of worry pierced the impatience I felt; occasionally Grammaude had days when it was hard to draw deep breaths and there was a sensation around her heart that felt, she said, as if an elephant were sitting on her chest. These attacks had frightened me at first, but she said she had been checked over just before she left Northpoint, and her doctor had said there was nothing critical there, just the expected weariness of old muscles and long-used lungs. She was simply to rest when she felt the elephant, and it would be gone in a few hours. And it always had been, at least by the next day.

But usually, also, she would follow her announcement that the

elephant was back with a wry smile and the statement, “A very small elephant.” This time she did not. Even that annoyed me. Could it be possible that she was feigning illness to keep me from seeing Warrie?

“’Bye,” I said breezily. “I’ll get the crab anyway, on our way back. We can have salad for supper.”

“Goodbye, darling,” she said. And I went out into the diamond morning to meet Warrie, who was standing in the lane outside the barberry hedge in white pants and a striped shirt looking decidedly international. He had a string bag with a real French baguette in it and bottles of red wine and Perrier.

“Good God,” I said, grinning. “
Matelot, matelot
…remember the old Noel Coward song? You’re far too exotic for Retreat.

I ought to take you over to Northeast Harbor or somewhere rich. Where on earth did you get the French bread?”

“Bribed the baker in Castine to make me some,” he said.

“It’s probably made with brown flour and Crisco, but the shape’s right.”

The yacht club was practically deserted, and I could see from the number of empty floats that almost everybody had had the same fog-spawned yearning for open sea that I had.

One or two small boys were still wrestling with their Beetles, and a small knot of women sat on the porch, taking a breather from the preparations for that afternoon’s tea. It was Saturday, one of the last regattas. I had forgotten. I felt my throat tighten a bit; I had not wanted to meet anyone I had known before in Retreat this summer, except Grammaude and her old friends. But I had been bound to do it sometime.

Looking at them, I could not tell if they were old acquaintances of mine or people I had never seen before. They looked almost exactly alike to me, in tennis dresses or white shorts and shirts, and no one looked familiar. I wondered if twelve years had altered me as much in their

eyes, or if it was my own eyes that had changed their way of seeing. I lifted a hand and smiled toward the group in case they were known to me, and a chorus of polite greetings floated back: “Hello, Darcy. I heard you were here.” “It’s nice to see you; you’ve cut your hair or something, haven’t you?”

“Come and say hello, when you get back, and have a cup of tea.”

I called back that I would, meaning to do no such thing.

I did not take Warrie up to be introduced. I never even considered that he might know these women, but when one of them called out, “Warrie! Wait up!” and got up and started down the steps toward us, I wondered why I had not. Of course he would have met them; he would have met almost everyone by now. He’d been here since April, after all. It was I who had been sequestered.

The woman came close, and I saw she was about my age or perhaps a bit older, and startlingly beautiful. Familiar, too, in a way that brought the old fear out of hiding to snap at me briefly. Who was she? Why the stab of anxiety? Then I knew: Gretchen Winslow, my grandmother’s old enemy’s granddaughter. Her grandmother had been a beauty too, and her mother, I had heard, and fully as mean as Gretchen.

What a pity to waste those genes on Winslow women, I said to myself peevishly, remembering the ugly little scene on the Willises’ boathouse dock all those years ago, when she had jeered at me about my mother’s madness and nymphomania in front of all the colony children. It had taken Mike Willis to shut her up, Mike and his grandfather Micah.

“Hello, Gretchen,” I said. She smiled sweetly at me and reached up and kissed Warrie lightly on the mouth.

“You rat,” she said. “You never called after Southampton.

I waited all the rest of the weekend. If

you think you’re getting your sweater back, think again.”

“Hello, Gretch,” he said, disentangling himself and patting her on the rear. “Keep the sweater, by all means. You do it far more justice than I. When did you get here?”

“Day before yesterday,” she said. “I was going to come over and see if you wanted to sail with Corky Stallings and me this afternoon, but I see you’re spoken for.”

“I’m not regatta material,” he said. “Darcy’s going to show me about this fabulous creature called a Beetle Cat. I’m only familiar with power boats, I’m afraid.”

“Too bad,” she said, turning away to resume her place in the group. “I’d have bet you were world-class material.

Regatta, of course. We’ll have to work on that.” She smiled again and went up the steps, and we went down the dock gangway to the dinghy, to row out to the Beetle Cat.

“I didn’t know you knew Gretchen,” I said. “I didn’t remember your knowing her that last summer.”