Colony (7 page)

But I knew that first day, and Peter did, and probably his father and sister too, that the battle lines between us had been drawn and no tide on earth would really wash them away.

Peter’s father looked at us and started to speak, then did not. Hermione said, “Really, Buddy, you do have the most awful sense of timing.”

And Peter stood, held his hand out to me, and said, “Maude?” I took it, and we walked out of there, stopping only to pick up my heavy old suitcase, which still lurked in the foyer like a poor relation, and waited on the front steps in the chill twilight for the taxi Peter had called. When it came, we went to the train station and boarded a train to Elkton, Maryland, sat up in a dingy Pullman all night while the train plowed south, got off in the soft Maryland dawn, asked a taxi driver to take us to the nearest justice of the peace, and were married by 10 A.M. that morning.

I don’t remember that Peter looked back at his home when we rode away from it.

We were happy during the few June days we spent in the little house on the edge of the Northpoint campus. It stood on the edge of a small birch wood, and I was enchanted with the ghostly silver gleam of the white trunks in the dusk, and the alien smells and sounds of these northern foothill forests, and the strange birds and animals that came close to our small veranda at evening. It was so totally unlike the woods and the

swamp at home; the air smelled of pine wine, not sweet heat-heavy old earth, and nipped and bit, instead of pressing down; the nights called for fires and sweaters and piled blankets and the days for brisk movement. It was a minimal little cottage at best, the lowest rank of housing for the lowest rank of faculty, which Peter was, but we did not care about that. The old stone and brick school was nearly deserted in those cool June days, as the summer term had not begun and Peter’s work would not begin until September. We were alone in those green-blue old hills except for the headmaster and his nice no-nonsense wife, who had us to dinner to see that we were comfortably settled in and then mercifully left us alone, and for a few of the custodial staff, small brown men in overalls. We arranged furniture and hung a few prints and pictures and ate the unspeakable meals I cooked and explored the campus and ranged farther afield into the hamlets and villages and up to Laconia and Lake Winnepesaukee itself, twenty miles to our north. There, alone with Peter in a still green twilight on the shores of that beautiful old lake, I heard for the first time the neck-prickling, heart-swelling cry of a loon.

I turned a rapt face to Peter. He smiled.

“You’ll get used to them,” he said. “We have them in the harbor in Retreat.”

I was silent for a while, and then I said, “I don’t want to go, Peter. I’m afraid of Retreat. I’m afraid of everything there.

I’m never ever going to be able to please your mother. You think because you can sweet-talk her out of any mood that I can too, but I can’t.”

He laughed. “You just have to let her know right up front she can’t boss you,” he said. “Who’s ever bossed you, Maude?

What have you ever been afraid of? You, who handle water snakes and paddle right up to gators and swim in that god-forsaken black swamp water and stay out in the jungle by yourself for hours and days?”

I said nothing. I don’t think Peter ever really understood the depth or quality of the fear I felt for his mother and her world and the cost for me of accommodating to it all those years. He could always handle her; she doted on him as I have never known another woman to dote on a son, and her marblelike imperiousness never daunted him as it did me and others. It was useless to try to explain to him how I felt.

But I did say, “Why couldn’t we just vacation somewhere else this one summer and go to Retreat next year? Along the coast here, or on this lake even; it looks wonderful, and there are all sorts of cottages we could rent.”

“Because I don’t start getting paid until September,” Peter said. “And we have just about enough money left to get us up to Retreat. We’re pretty poor, Maudie. We’re not apt to have much money ever. Even if I got to be a headmaster someday, somewhere, there wouldn’t be a lot.”

“I don’t care about that,” I said honestly. “You know that.

We’ve talked about it. I’ve never had any money to speak of.

I won’t miss it.”

“Well, I’ve had lots. Really lots. I probably won’t get any more, because it’s in Mother’s name and I don’t think she’s going to part with any of it unless I go into the bank. It’s her last weapon; she’s not going to give it up. And I won’t do that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want anything more than teaching here or somewhere. I’m not very ambitious, my poor Maudie. I just wanted to be sure you didn’t mind.”

“Lord, no,” I said. “My mother’s family never gave us any of theirs either, not really. How could I miss what I never had? Let’s just make our own, enough for the two of us, and tell the rest of the world to take a hike. Crawl into bed and pull the covers up over us, and never come out.”

He smiled at me, and the sweet, thick warmth in the pit of my stomach that stayed there most of the time began its slow coil up inside me once more. Sometimes I could scarcely breathe with the knowledge that for the rest of my life, whenever we wanted, Peter and I could lie down wherever we wished and do to each other the things that we did in the cool nights and pale dawns of Northpoint, New Hampshire. Who, I thought, reaching up to touch his face, cared about money when they could have that?

Peter put his hands on my breasts and pushed me back down onto the old blanket we had brought with us.

“You’re going to have a hard time realizing we don’t do this in Retreat,” he said, putting his hands under my clothes.

He ran the fingertips of one down my stomach, along the line of dark hair that grew there, and into the dark warmth below it.

I rolled over to face him, opening my legs.

“You’re kidding,” I breathed into his neck. It was hot, scalding.

“Oh, no,” he said, easing over onto me. His hardness pressed against my thighs and then slipped down between them. “Nobody fucks in Retreat. Reproduction is accom-plished by cell division, like amoebas. You’d be thrown out of the colony if they even suspected you did this.”

He thrust, and thrust again. I felt the heat start up, up.

“Well, you shouldn’t have corrupted me then,” I gasped, arching up to meet him. “I can’t just stop doing this…now…oh!”

“Or this?”

“No….”

“Or this? Oh, God, Maude….”

“Hurry, Peter, hurry….”

“You’ll have to give it up because the houses are so close together that you can hear…oh, Jesus, Maude…
everything
.”

“Then,” I said fiercely, riding with him up that long red crest, seeing lights explode behind my closed eyelids, “you’ll just have to stuff a pillow in my mouth every time because I’m very surely going to scream—”

And did. And heard his whoop of laughter spill out with his climax.

I never tired of it, that long slide into red darkness, that shuddering up-spiral, that joyous outspilling. I would ride with him into hell on that, I thought. Bed and laughter, those two things, with Peter, would last forever, withstand anything.

And despite what he said, we could do those things anywhere, including Retreat. Who would dare to stop us?

No matter that I came to feel the cold of Hannah Chambliss’s mind reach out for me as the miles between us shortened, we set off for Maine on a blue-edged morning not long after that evening in an envelope of sensuality and laughter.

Retreat lies at the tip of Cape Rosier, a wild green stub of land fingering out into Penobscot Bay farther than any other land mass on that coast. Only the great islands of the bay—Deer Isle, North Haven, Islesboro—are more sea-locked and inaccessible. The seas around the cape, unbroken for many miles in their sweep up the Penobscot, are dark blue and empty for hours and sometimes days at a time of sail traffic, all but the enormous oceangoing sail yachts preferring the island-sheltered harbors around Rosier. There are many, teeming with sails and yacht clubs and summer homes and colonies: Bucks Harbor, at South Brooksville; Orcutt; Center Harbor, at Haven, near Brooklin; and the entire archipelago of small sheltered harbors around the tip of Naskeag Point into Blue Hill Bay and beyond into the great blue of Frenchman’s Bay. Here the truly wealthy have for a hundred summers nestled their enclaves like small succulent piglets nosing at the pure-cream teats of Bar Harbor and Mount Desert.

Over on that side of the long peninsula that juts out from Blue Hill down to Naskeag, the water is acknowledged to be warmer and gentler, the houses far grander and more accessible, the air sweeter and milder, and the blood far bluer. Cape Rosier is a wild place for mavericks, the conventional summer-people wisdom goes, for those who prefer their own society and don’t mind the great seas and booming blue winds and howling storms; who don’t care that the nearest good shopping town is elegant old Castine, some twenty miles away over horrendous roads (though, if you could go by water, it would be nearer five). The very small village of South Brooksville provides a general store and rental library and cemetery and infinitesimal post office; it is typical of Retreaters that they are proud that the post office was, until the early 1960s, the smallest in the United States. Surrounding farms provide produce, eggs, and milk; fishing boats bring in lobsters and haddock; tidal flats yield clams. A trip to Blue Hill or Ellsworth, for serious shopping and culture, is a half-day prospect, and a sojourn to Bar Harbor can still take the whole of a day, well into darkness. I once offered the suggestion to Mother Hannah that one saw the same faces year after year in Retreat because nobody else wanted to bother with it.

“I know we’re supposed to be very careful who we let into Retreat,” I said, “and I’ve heard for years how hard it is for outsiders to be accepted here. But for my money, it’s because nobody but us could ever find the place, much less want to go to all the trouble of getting to it and actually living in it.”

I was, by then, finally able to tease Mother Hannah a little; I say finally, because it took me years to dare to do it. Mother Hannah never did come to invite it. But she seldom realized she was being teased, either, so I was fairly safe the few times I did.

“Nonsense,” she said serenely, bothered not at all by any opinion I might have. “There are many people who would move heaven and earth to be a part of Retreat. But they’re rarely suitable, and they wouldn’t be happy here anyway.

We’re very plain-living people, you know, when we’re up here. And often quite high-minded; most people are far happier in Northeast Harbor or at Bass Cove or Somes Sound.

Places like that. Even Bar Harbor.”

Her high-arched nose told me what she thought of those sinks of depravity and excess.

Peter, who was lying stretched full-length before the fire eating apples while one of our frequent June nor’easters moaned outside, said from the depths of an old Hudson Bay blanket, “ ‘The soul selects her own society and shuts the door. On her divine majority, obtrude no more.’ ”

“Exactly,” Mother Hannah said. “That’s very cleverly put, darling.”

“Emily Dickinson thought so,” Peter’s voice, suspiciously equable, said from the couch.

“Is she that strange little woman with the bicycle visiting Frances and English Sears?” Mother Hannah said vaguely.

“I doubt it,” Peter said, laughter breaking through. “From what I hear, she never left her own back yard in her entire life.”

“Really, darling, you know the strangest people.”

“Don’t I just,” said Peter.

For whatever reason, mainly geographical ones, Cape Rosier and Retreat remain nearly as untouched today as they did on that long-ago day I first came here, and in a way it is a great pity, for this coast and

the countryside around it are by far the most beautiful I have ever seen. But at first it frightened me. Stark, jutting, thickly forested with the graceful pointed firs whose silhouettes against the sky can break the heart, gray-spined where the great rock ribs of the earth break through, and bound at the sea’s edge by huge pink boulders and fierce red ledges left by the last dying glaciers, the cape seems, at first, inimicable to man, inhospitable to life. The great blue skies and endless indigo seas—edged in a kind of crystal light when the weather is about to change for the worse, losing themselves altogether in the thick, silent, white sea fogs that sometimes roll in for weeks—seem to me to be deeper, purer, harder, vaster than anywhere else on that old coast. On the wind you can hear the cries of gulls all the way out on the big islands, or the fog buoy miles and miles away off Stonington on Deer Isle. On the days of high sun and still blue air, you can see the line of the Camden Hills across the entire great bay. Sight, sound, smells all have a preternatural keenness here.

It seems to me—and I remember it was perhaps the first thought I had when at last we jolted out of the forest and saw Retreat lying ahead of us in the sunset, at the end of that endless day—that Cape Rosier is about clarity. Simply that.

There is nothing here shifting, seeping, insidious, seductive, smothering, soft, to blur the edges of anything. The sharp beauty cuts like a knife. Even the small rich green sweeps of the little sea meadows, thick with wildflowers and rimmed with the black-green of the firs; even the undulating fringes of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace along the dusty roadsides; even the riots of short-lived summer flowers in the yards of the most humble shacks—even these seem as sharply and clearly limned as the details of a Dali painting. To my senses, long lulled by the velvety morass that is the Low Country, it looked that day a country of a million sharp and dangerous and beautiful sword points.

“I never saw anything so beautiful,” I said to Peter finally, when it was obvious that he was waiting for me to tell him what I thought of this place he so loved. “And it looks like it could easily kill you. Peter, it’s all so…
sharp
.”

He looked at me and smiled. “I know what you mean. But it’s just what you’ll come to love about it. It’s…all open to you. It keeps nothing back. It shows you its teeth and spine and breath, and in the end something in you rises up to meet and match it. It never coddles you, but in the end it gets the best out of you. And it gives you its best. It clears away a lot of unnecessary stuff, this coast, this place. I guess what I mean is that it’s possible to learn about absolutes here. You’ve never had that in Charleston.”