Colony (9 page)

When we got home, it was my mother-in-law who finally shooed us upstairs. Peter had lapsed into silence, sitting beside his father on the sofa with the birch logs snapping in the fireplace, and made no move to rise, and I would have died in my tracks rather than initiate any movement up to where that huge bed crouched. I sat looking at yellowing old magazines, my eyes growing heavier and finally drooping, until Mother Hannah came out of the rudimentary little kitchen and said, “You children should get some sleep now.

You’ve had a full day, and you’ll

want to be out and around with the birds in the morning.

Peter, Parker Potter said to tell you he needs a partner on the court at eight, and he’ll wait until eight fifteen for you. Tina’s making pancakes in the morning; she said to tell you. She brought you the first of the blueberry jam. Maude, dear, is there anything you need?”

Nothing but a long, hard, teeth-jarring, eyelid-rattling fuck from your son, I thought, getting to my feet.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Well, then, good night. If you should want anything, just call out. I’ll hear you.”

No, you won’t, I thought.

But of course she did. Peter was reluctant when at last we slid under the heavy covers in the big bed, but slowly, and in total silence, I teased him with my fingers and then my hands, and then arms and legs and feet, and soon he had no choice but to roll over to cover me with his body, and only a moment after that he entered me. He was quieter than he had ever been before, and so was I; we strained and thrust together in total silence, our muscles clenching to keep from shaking the old iron bed. But it was no use. Both our climaxes were beginning when I heard her voice, as clear as a funeral bell, drifting up through the floor. “Peter? Are you ill, dear?”

He stiffened and lay rigid; I felt him slip out of me.

“No, Ma,” he called, his voice tight.

“I thought you called out.”

“No, Ma.”

He lay beside me in the darkness for a moment, quiet and still, and then he said, “You still game?”

“Oh, yes….”

And again, as the damp heat flowered deep within me and all of that secret darkness opened for him, came the voice.

“Peter? Petie?”

“Ma, I’m fine,” Peter called back. His voice now was flat and furious. For some reason, I began to laugh. I laughed and I laughed, even as, inside, I ached for him, burned with incompletion. I could not stop. I stuffed the covers into my mouth, but the silent shaking went on and on.

“By God, come on, Maude,” Peter said between clenched teeth, and got out of bed and jerked me after him, and caught up the Princeton blanket and pulled both of us into the tiny, freezing bathroom off the bedroom.

“What?” I whispered, doubled over with laughter. “What are you doing, you damned fool?”

He threw the blanket into the stained old claw foot bathtub and half pushed me in on top of it.

“I’m fucking my wife,” he muttered. “I started it and by God I’m going to finish it and Mother can go kiss a quahog if she doesn’t like it. This sonofabitch is bolted to the floor; if she can hear it thumping and squeaking she’s a goddamn witch. Lie down, Maude.”

I did. My head hung over one end of the bathtub and my feet over the other, and my stomach heaved with silent laughter. I looked at my tall thin naked husband, standing over me. He was shivering with cold and rage and his hair hung down in his slitted eyes, and he was fully and powerfully erect. I loved him absolutely. The laughter threatened to burst from my lips and sweep down the stairs and drown my mother-in-law.

“She
is
a witch,” I gasped. “I could have told you that. She’s turned me into a pig and you into a whooping crane with a hard-on.”

And so it was that we made love for the first time in Retreat, Peter and I: laughing and wallowing in a cold porcelain bathtub on a black-and-orange Princeton University blanket, with a washcloth in my mouth to

stop my cries and the sound of Peter’s mother’s voice over his laughter as he came: “Peter? Are you sure you’re all right?”

I awoke the next morning to pale sunlight in a square on the bedclothes and the flickering wash of sea light on the ceiling.

I was alone in the bed. Downstairs I could hear nothing at all, and I had no idea what time it was. Summer dawns come very early in Retreat; it could as easily be five thirty as nine.

Peter might well be on the tennis court by now.

I lay still, not wanting to go downstairs after last night’s bedroom farce. It was chilly in the little room, but my body still held the warmth of his. I might have him to myself in the nights, I thought, but each morning that dawned would draw him up and away from me and out into this place where he walked as surely and carelessly as a young king, where I did not think I could ever truly follow. I felt my throat tighten and my eyes begin to sting. I felt as abandoned and alone as I ever have in my life.

From somewhere close by I heard a voice, old and fairly quavering with malice, say, “If I had treated my husband’s grandmother as badly as you do me, he would have divorced me. You are an ill-bred and thoughtless and self-serving child, and I shall have to tell Parker that you have forgotten my breakfast again for the third time in a week. He will not be pleased, Amy. Oh, no.”

I got out of bed and went in my thin nightgown to the window and looked out. The morning was still and yellow and blue; the sea glittered. The big house just behind ours, Braebonnie, was undoubtedly the source of that malignant voice. The Potters’, I remembered. The Potters senior and junior, and the senior Potter’s old mother. It had to be her voice I

had heard. And its target must be, had to be, the vivid dark-eyed girl I had met last night at the dining hall. Amy, young Parker Potter’s wife. My heart actually contracted with pain for her pain at the old woman’s hands, and knife-edged sympathy.

“Oh, poor Amy,” I said aloud, but only just. “I know, I know.”

And then, incredibly, I heard the sound of a young girl’s joyous laugh. And that remembered voice, as cool and light as rain, said, “Oh, Mamadear, what an old fool you are! You had your silly breakfast two hours ago. You’ve forgotten again.”

And a door shut and the voices trailed away. I got back into bed and lay there, watching the sun square creep across my comforter. I smiled. I knew, as surely as if I could see into the future, that in Amy Parker I had an ally and would soon have a friend.

T
he first week I was in Retreat I met three people who altered the channel of my life as surely as dynamite will alter a watercourse. The first, of course, was Amy Potter; before Amy I had never really had a friend; afterward she was the benchmark against whom all friendships were measured. The second was her husband, Parker. The third was a man who saved my life before I knew his name. They are all dead now.

It is ironic that so often the stream outlives the cataclysms that shape it.

I met Parker Potter the morning of my first full day in the colony and by its end had come to wish the meeting had never occurred. Though he never in his life ceased to hug or kiss me in greeting, or to tease me with what seemed to be affection, I always knew he saw me through a scrim of enmity.

Parker was as bad an enemy as his wife was a good friend.

When I came downstairs that morning the cottage was deserted. I had been unsure what one wore mornings in Retreat, and so had put on the dressing gown that Kemble had given me for a wedding present. It was a beautiful heavy satin that fell

like spilled syrup, coral piped in white, with handmade lace on the lapels. I walked in it through the gloom of the downstairs and out onto the porch and breathed in the sights and sounds of Retreat in the morning, and my heart, despite its ballast of uncertainty and apprehension, rose up singing like a lark. The air was crisp and damp and pine-scented, the bay danced cobalt, white sails flitted sharply against the faraway blue of the Camden Hills like butterflies, and the crystal air swarmed with birdsong, so that it seemed to rise up out of the very earth, seep from the birch woods, pour from the rocks. There was a whole web of sounds and smells that were alien to me, and all of a sudden I was very happy. This entire exotic northern world lay waiting for me to explore, to come to know through my very pores, as I did the wild country of the Wappoo Creek swamp forests. I thought of the long lazy summer days ahead of me, this and all the summers of my life, spent with Peter deep in the woods or on the rocks of the shore with a book or a sketchbook, or even on the calm surfaces of the little coves that I could see from the porch, in a canoe. I smiled and stretched my arms out as far as I could, and closed my eyes, and breathed deeply.

“Good morning,” two nasal voices called from the path in front of the cottage, and I opened my eyes to see, first, two ramrod-straight old ladies in many layers of starched cotton, gloves, and sun hats, and, second, that my lace lapels had lapped open and the morning sun was shining on an unmistakable suck mark on my left breast. One of the old ladies lifted a lorgnette from her bosom and examined me. I pulled my lapels together hastily and grinned, as Kemble once said, like a possum in the middle of a cow plop, feeling the heat flood up my neck to my hairline.

“Good morning,” I called. “Isn’t it a glorious day?”

“Very nice,” said the first, averting her eyes delicately.

“Please tell your dear mother-in-law that we’ll call again when…you are more settled in,” said the second. In her hand I saw, silver against the white glove, her card case at the ready. They marched down the path in lockstep, and into the road, and on toward the next cottage, heads together. I could just imagine the gist of their conversation. So much for dressing gowns in Retreat.

I crept into the kitchen, found it empty, and opened the old icebox door. It was nearly empty except for a blue earthenware pitcher of milk. I poured some into a tumbler and drank it, sweet and fresh, and then my eye fell on a note propped against the sugar bowl on the old scrubbed deal table in the very center of the slanting floor. It was from my mother-in-law:

Maude, dear,
Peter and Parker Potter from Braebonnie have
gone sailing and will likely be out until dinnertime.

I have taken Christina to the fishmonger’s truck. We
will be back about ten. I thought we would start our
calls this morning, and then Mrs. Stallings wants
us for a little luncheon. This afternoon I’ll show you
the cottage routine. A simple cotton morning dress
will do nicely.

Love, Mother Hannah.

My heart fell to my feet. Calls? Luncheons with other old ladies…perhaps, even, the two I had just put to rout? The cottage routine? Why had Peter left me alone? Why had he not even wakened me? Last night had, in the end, been transcendent…. Suddenly, as clearly as if I had the Sight, I saw the shape of my days in Retreat.

“No, I won’t,” I said aloud. “Not today. Tomorrow, maybe, but not today, not until I’ve seen Peter and talked things over with him; not until I’ve seen the colony and the countryside and been down to the ocean. I haven’t even been down to the ocean yet.”

I flew upstairs and skinned into slacks and a sweater and tennis shoes, such as I might wear into the woods at Belleau in the autumn, and ran out of the house and down the dirt road that led, I knew, to the yacht club. I would pretend I had not seen the note. Time enough tomorrow to begin my sentence.

The Cove Harbor Yacht Club was then, as it is now, a rambling brown-weathered shingle Cape Cod, sagging porches spread around it like skirts, sunk gently into the long grass at the very tip of Cove Point. Early wildflowers nodded around it. On one side, that morning, the great empty bay stretched away toward Islesboro, which lay like a cloud in the middle distance. Beyond it the Camden Hills, that had been so sharp they seemed to vibrate in the eye when last I looked, were losing their definition in the dazzle of the sun.

There was a peculiar softening to the edges of the nearer, smaller, dark green islands. It was hard to calculate the time of day.

On the other side of the point, Cove Harbor lay like a bite taken out of an apple, a sheltered half moon rimmed in great pink rocks, an enormous lone boulder standing on the shingle beach. The tide was far out; rocks and boulders wore beards of wet green moss and were pebbled with mollusks and barnacles. There were a few sloops and catboats bobbing at their buoys, canvases lapped tight and buttoned around their masts. A fleet of dinghies bumped at the foot of the long catwalk that extended like a finger out from the gray wooden dock. One boat, a long, low, racing sloop with lines like a deer in flight, stood ready to cast off, it seemed to me; its sails were up

but loose, flapping gently in the little wind, and there were canvas bundles on the coaming, and a wicker hamper covered with cloth. But there was no one in evidence aboard her. The name on her transom read
Circe
. I peered around the harbor and saw no one. Peter was not in sight.

I stood still in disappointment, the stark beauty of the harbor and shore losing much of its impact. I thought perhaps Peter might be in the clubhouse, and went up the shallow steps and tried the door, but it was locked, and the salt-scummed windows were shuttered over. I turned away slowly.

Peter and Parker Potter had evidently gotten clear away.

There seemed no recourse but Mother Hannah and morning calls in the simple morning dress I did not own.

“Ahoy, there,” someone called, and I turned to see a young man coming out of the clubhouse.

“Ahoy,” I answered, shielding my eyes to look at him. The peculiar dazzle of the sun was directly behind him, and I could only see that he was short and stocky and had very red hair. The light on it was like live coals.

“You can only be the new Mrs. Chambliss,” he said, coming down the steps into the shade of a great overhanging blue spruce. Without the light I saw that he was perhaps Peter’s age, and had blue eyes screwed up into slits against the sun and a deep mahogany tan that was striking with the hair, until he came close enough for me to see that his entire face was a mass of freckles run together, like a mask. It should have been grotesque, but it wasn’t; the snub nose and small white teeth gave him the look of a young boy, and a chipped front tooth added to the Huckleberry Finn aura. His hair hung in his eyes and his shirt sleeve was out at the elbow and there was a brownish stain on his white pants. Something in his bearing told me he was not a worker or an employee; he just missed swaggering, with his barrel chest and short legs and rolling walk. Suddenly I knew who he was.