Colony (8 page)

I started to protest and then did not. He was right. That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood-warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness—it could soothe you and charm you and teach you much, but it could not cleanse and clarify. This place could. Perhaps that was what I feared most: that Cape Rosier and Retreat would ask of me a sea change that I somehow could not afford, or would fail to make.

“I don’t think I’ll leave this place the same person as I came here,” I said obscurely, and he grinned wider and ruffled my hair and told me I was ridiculous, that I would be me, only more so, in Retreat.

All these years later, I still do not know who was right.

From the pitted county blacktop a sandy lane led off into the fir and birch groves that ran straight down to the sea, and there was an old gray wooden oar fastened to a post there that said, in letters faded

nearly to invisibility, RETREAT COLONY, COVE HARBOR YACHT

CLUB. The road was absolutely still and quiet, and the crystal-blue air was chilling as we sat there in the open car. I drew my sweater around me, shivering with more than cold. We might have been looking down into the dawn of time; no roofline or chimney or smoke rise broke the serrated line of the firs. No human voice cut the silence. Only the mewling cry of the gulls and, far away, a little hushing sussuration that I found later to be the gentle wash of the tide on the shingle beach.

“Well, let’s do it,” Peter said, and put the car into gear. I could not muster enough breath to reply. I was, at that moment, absolutely terrified.

Retreat has, instead of streets, a web of narrow, wildflower-fringed sandy lanes that wander through the dark woods, all of them leading one way or another to the water. The old houses are mostly gray-or brown-weathered cedar shingle, so that in the twilight all you can see of them at first is the flash of white trim and the blazing window boxes. Then your eyes adjust to the green darkness and you can pick them out, set back in that primeval forest from the lanes, bulking high against the lucent sky: tall and rambling, winged and elled old dowagers with many windows and porches, shouldering in among the great gray rocks that lie slumped like elephants on that rich black earth. All have views of the bay or the harbor, and the ones at the ends of the lanes have magnificent wraparound vistas; I often, in those early years, envied the families who had that largesse as a part of their lives whenever they chose to look at it. Liberty, our cottage, looked out to sea only over the shoulders of Braebonnie, the Potters’

newer and larger cottage, which had been built on the very cliff overlooking the shingle beach. You could see the sea, but you did not have that wild, all-pervasive sense of it that Braebonnie and many other Retreat cottages offered.

“It’s because Liberty is one of the three original cottages here,” Mother Hannah told me that first summer. “In those days you could only come here by packet from Rockland, and it docked down at the foot of our lane. Peter’s dear grandfather was thinking of his family’s comfort when he built here. It was only a short journey up from the dock, you see. Easier on the servants too. Of course, no one in that original little group of settlers ever expected people to actually buy up the land between them and the water and build more…imposing homes. There was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement among the originals. But of course Braebonnie was built much later by, I believe, some people from Connecticut. We didn’t know them; they didn’t care for Retreat after all and sold almost immediately to the Potters. I must say I’ve always been relieved to have them so close by; fellow Bostonians, you know. Even if the house is…a bit excessive for a simple summer colony.”

Braebonnie was indeed large—it had perhaps twenty rooms—but it sprawled down the cliff in a weathered, mossy pile of shingle and stone so sweetly and unassumingly that it did not seem to me the least imposing. I loved it. I always have, ever since that first summer. So many of my happiest memories of Retreat were born in Braebonnie, when Amy and I were young together. I love Liberty too, of course; it is all I have of youth and Peter, and it is unquestionably home to me. But it is so somehow like Mother Hannah—square, upright, uncompromising—that I often fancy I can see her in the cedar-dark old rooms, straight-spined and austere and moving with her silent, sweeping tread, or hear her voice in the emptiness. As I said, sound is queer here by the water.

“Get out of here. This is my house now,” I have said to that disapproving shade more than once. And to exorcise her I have cut her lilacs down to size, and added a long sun porch that commands the sea, and enlarged all the back windows and added many, so that the sound of the water is the last thing one hears at night, and the dancing stipple of sea light on the ceiling is the first thing one’s opening eyes see in the morning. She would absolutely have hated all of it. Mother Hannah was always more annoyed than exalted by the sea.

After the ritual of welcome, which never varied until Mother Hannah’s death—the cool little kiss, the light embrace, the offered cheek smelling of talcum and smooth linen stored in cedar—she opened her arms to Peter and held them so until he came into them, and when she had him firm, she closed her eyes and rolled her cheek back and forth in the angle where his neck met his shoulder, smiling as rapturously as a nursing kitten. There were tears on her satiny cheek when she finally let him go and stepped back to look at him.

“You’re far too thin,” she said. “And you’ve lost your lovely tan. You shall have days and days in the sun simply vegetat-ing, and Christina and I are going to feed you till you pop.

If you’re this worn out now, what on earth will you be when you start your position?”

Mother Hannah could never bring herself to say, simply, “teaching.”

“I haven’t lost an ounce, Ma, and I’ve been sailing every day for the past week at Northpoint,” Peter said. “Winnepesaukee is right there. Stop fussing. Maude feeds me like a pig.

She’s turning into a great cook.”

“I’m sure she is,” Mother Hannah said, smiling her little V

smile at me. “These pretty southern girls are born knowing how to please a man, I expect.”

Both my neglect of her son and my overblown southern carnality hung in the air between my mother-in-law and me.

I smiled brightly at her. She had forgiven

Peter, I knew; the household appointments and the handsome roadster said as much. I also knew she had not forgiven me.

The daughter-in-law she would present tonight to her world assembled at the dining hall was so patently not the one she would have chosen that it must have seemed in her wintry eyes grotesque.

“I’m trying hard,” I said. “I never cooked at home, but taking care of Peter is number one now.”

“Yes,” she said.

Peter’s father kissed me, I thought, with genuine pleasure and picked up my bags.

“The back corner, darling, please,” Mother Hannah said, and Peter and his father looked at her.

“That room is an oven, Ma,” Peter said. “And it’s just got the one twin bed. I thought we’d have my old room.”

“I know, sweetie, but Micah found dry rot in some of the floorboards in your room this spring, and he wasn’t sure about the weight of two people.”

Her eyes measured me. I flushed.

“Besides,” she said, “it has much the prettiest view of the water. And I had Micah bring up the big bed.”

She dropped her eyes and I flushed again. Peter’s father vanished up a staircase of suicidal steepness and we followed him. I took a great deep breath, partly in relief at being out of her presence at last and partly of pure pleasure at the wonderful smell of old cedar holding the warmth of the day.

The cottage has never been winterized, so that the exterior shingles of red cedar are also the interior walls, and the rafters and beams are of the same wood, and over the long years it has mellowed to a glorious, dark, fire-shot honey gold.

“The color,” Amy once said, “of the world’s most beautiful chestnut horse.”

Our room, at the end of the upstairs central hall, was indeed tiny. The huge white iron bed dominated

it. It was turned back, so that thin, lovely old white linen sheets showed their cutwork, and it was piled with crisp-slipped goosedown pillows and comforters and a thick orange-and-black Princeton blanket. I smiled, at the great bed and the blanket and at Peter.

“Old school ties,” I said.

“There’s one like it on practically every bed in Retreat,”

Peter said. “It was my grandfather and some of his club members who found this place and established the colony.

For years afterward they only let in fellow Tigers, and then they started to have their own little tigers—conceived literally under the orange and black, you might say—and one thing led to another, and now Retreat is almost a Princeton alumni colony. You’re going to get sick of ‘Going Back to Old Nas-sau’ pretty soon.”

“No Yale? No Harvard?”

“Very few. They go to Northeast Harbor, or Bar, or somewhere. Or buy their own islands. Just Princeton. And virtually all of the Seven Sisters, of course.”

“Of course,” I said in despair. “Oh, Peter, I’m going to stand out like a sore thumb. No Boston, no New England, no tennis, no sailing, no Seven Sisters. Not even a college degree. Not even a year of college. What am I going to do?”

“You could always stay in bed and fuck your husband,” he said. “You’d be the envy of every woman from sixteen to ninety. Like I said, nobody does it in Retreat.”

“Well, how come there’re so many of you?”

“Oh, we screw at home,” he said. “That’s what those long dark winters are for.”

I looked at the huge bed. “It’s hard to think about anything else, with that thing looming up like an iceberg,” I said, grinning.

He laughed. For some reason, there was little mirth in it.

I looked at him inquiringly.

“Well, think hard,” he said. “Because it’s apt to be what you do the most of in that bed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She’s put us right over her head,” he said. “This room is directly above the big downstairs bedroom they use, and this bed is directly above theirs. You could drop a pin in here, and they’d hear it down there. My old room is at the other end of the house; I’ve actually set off firecrackers in it and no one knew. Unless you like the idea of my mother and father lying there listening to every hump we hump, we’re going to have to come up with something else.”

“Well, let’s just move back into yours.”

“Dry rot,” he said, “Remember?”

“Surely there are other places?”

“Yep. A nice room directly next to theirs where you can hear even better, and four bunk beds in a room up under the eaves where nobody could breathe from July on, and four hammocks on the upstairs sun porch. With huge holes in the screen. So that every black fly and mosquito in Maine would feast off your ass from now until September.”

Red rage flooded me. “I don’t care if she hears us every night,” I said hotly. “She must know we do it. She must have done it at least once. Here you are, after all. I will not stop…doing that…just because she moved us in over her head. Peter, I know it was on purpose.”

“Of course it was,” he said. Laughter and anger warred in his long face.

“Well, are you going to let her stop us?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll figure something out. We could wait and do it when there’s a thunderstorm. Or we could sneak up here and do it at midmorning, when she’s out calling. Or we could do it over on one of the little islands; the moss there is as soft as a mattress. Or

we could take the boat out and drop anchor around the point and do it.”

“Peter! I think you’re afraid to let your mother know you make love to me!”

“Not afraid of her. Just afraid she’ll spoil it for us, if she catches us at it. I don’t want that to happen.”

I looked at him more closely. The laughter had left his eyes.

He was serious.

“Well, she’s not going to spoil it for me, and she’s not going to catch me at it, as you say, and I’m going to do it with you whenever I please, and I please this very night, after we get back from dinner,” I said indignantly. “The very idea!”

“Maude…”

“Hush. Don’t say another word. You are as good as fucked right now, Peter Chambliss. You are at this moment a walking fucked man,” I said.

“Well, since you put it that way,” Peter said, and put his hands around me from behind and cupped my breasts. I felt the little point of flame lick at my groin.

“How long does dinner last?” I whispered, reaching around to stroke the hardness of him against my back.

“Too long,” Peter said. “Way, way too long.”

He was right. The rest of the evening, though it was essentially over by nine thirty, was too long. When we went back downstairs, Augusta Stallings was there working on a large martini and Peter’s father had retreated to the long sofa before the fireplace and Peter’s mother introduced me and made her destined-to-be-legendary remark about the French and corruption, and from then on the evening and night blurred into one long smear of hot-cheeked, blinded misery. It has remained so in my memory ever since. I can recall certain highlights—the memory of Mrs. Stallings sitting down in a low

wicker armchair in the living room and missing and landing on her ample, corseted rump on the sisal rug, spilling not a drop of her third drink, is the most vivid, but there were others—but mainly, my first full evening in Retreat is a cipher, a void.

When I think back now, a low hum of seemly New England voices in the rustic dining hall rushes at me out of memory, and the warm fragrance of clam chowder and hot rolls, and the nodding of many narrow fairish heads, and the pressure of many cool fingers on mine, and the flash of many fine teeth, and the following wash of low conversation as we made our way on to our table. I get a sense of many young men and women who looked much like Peter reaching out to enfold him, not so much with their arms as their smiles, and thinking that I would never, never feel that welcome; I get a flash of several individual faces above cardigans and pearls or blue blazers. One—dark, clever, impish, framed in bobbed hair nearly the color of mine—stands out clearly: Amy Potter, the first time I ever saw her. I hear soft, flat voices asking me if I sailed or played tennis or bridge and assuring me I’d learn in no time. But there is no order and progression to the images. I was too tired and too cowed and, suddenly, too homesick for that other, warmer sea and the indulgent old city beside it.