Off Season (6 page)

I was just considering going down to see who was around and what sort of sandwiches Clara had set out for us when I heard my mother’s voice from the lawn below, pitched so that I could not claim not to have heard her.

“Lilly? Come on down. Peaches is here, and we’re having a little party for her.”

“Peaches is a shitass,” I told Wilma, and he grinned and stretched and rose, and we started unwillingly down into the summer of Peaches Davenport.

I hated Peaches. I had hated her ever since I’d first heard of her, a couple of months before we came to Edgewater. My mother had kept Jeebs and me at the dinner table after dessert one evening and said she had something to tell us: that a new little girl would be spending the summer at Edgewater, and she wanted us to be especially kind because the child had just gone through a terrible tragedy. Her name was Roberta Davenport, but she’d always been called Peaches because of her pretty coloring. She was the granddaughter of a retired Episcopal canon from Baltimore and his gentle, otherworldly wife. The Davenports summered in a big old Victorian down the shore from us toward Sedgwick, and in all the time I had known them, I had never known children to be in the house. Young grown-ups, yes: their son and his wife, and their daughter and her college friends, were in and out, though not often. Someone had told me it was because old Mrs. Davenport suffered from Nerves, and children caused her great distress. She was kind and interested when she encountered the children of Carter’s Cove, but in an abstracted way, and never paused to chat or came in to visit in our houses, as all the other grown-ups did.

“He’s just a saint, to put up with all those vapors and ‘conditions,’” my friend Cecie Wentworth’s silly mother said to my mother once, back in my spying days. “She keeps him so cloistered away, even up here, and he’s such a masculine, vigorous man. You know he’d rather be out sailing or hiking or whatever with the other men.”

Canon Davenport, in fact, was a vigorous and masculine man. He was tall, broad, tanned even though he was ostensibly cloistered, pitch-black of hair and mustache even at his age, which I thought to be middle seventies or somewhere near it—at death’s door, practically. He had a cultivated, resounding voice that could be heard from one end of Carter’s Cove to the other, and a narrow white smile like a wolverine’s. I could not imagine him dispensing compassion and Christly love from a pulpit.

“Peaches is going to be living with them now,” my mother said. “Her mother and father, the Davenports’ son and his wife, were killed at a railroad crossing in Baltimore last year. Of course the canon and his wife took her in and, as I understand it, really brought Peaches back to life. She was very ill with shock and grief; I gather she’s a rather sensitive child. But she’s doing much better now, and the Davenports thought a summer in the Maine air, with children her own age, might be just the thing for her. I gather she’s scarcely been out of their sight since the accident. I want you two to be especially nice to her, include her in your games, take her sailing and swimming, all that. Lilly, she’s just your age, eleven, and I think you might even know her, or at least have met her at some little party or other. Her best friend is Charlotte Glover—you know, Tatty’s little girl.”

A flash of corkscrew curls and sly, knowing eyes swam in my head, and I shook it furiously.

“Elizabeth,” my mother said in the “you’re in trouble” voice I seldom heard, “you will be nice to that little girl or you will go to camp this summer and not set foot at Edgewater. I mean it. No matter what that poor child is like, she’s been through something you cannot even imagine, and she needs young friends around her. The Davenports are lovely people, but they’re elderly. It’s not enough for a young girl.”

“Okay,” I said sulkily. “I’ll ask her to go everywhere we go. But you can’t make me like her.”

My mother stared levelly at me for a long moment, and then said, “I don’t ask that. But one unkindness on your part and I will know it. Don’t think I won’t.”

I didn’t think she wouldn’t. My mother’s astonishing, chatoyant gray eyes could see through solid walls and beyond to the horizon. I had no doubt of that.

“All right,” she said. “Jeebs?”

“Yeah,” Jeebs said, far away in some airborne equation. “Okay. No big deal.”

Although I knew he would emerge from the summer without the slightest notion of who Peaches Davenport was, and knew that my mother knew it, apparently she was satisfied. “Good,” she said. “They get there the same day we do. We’ll have a little luncheon for her.”

Until I heard my mother’s voice that morning, I had buried the coming of Peaches deep. Mulish obstinacy flooded me. I would nod to the little waif, wolf a sandwich, summon my special gang, and sail my Beetle Cat over to Sunderson’s Island, where, Clara had told me that morning, the ospreys were back in the nest on the big fir, and you could just see the babies. Peaches could practice her waifdom on the timid Forrest twins, and on Harriet Randall, who stuttered badly and often found reasons not to join us in our summer maraudings. They should be a gracious plenty for her.

My summer best friend, Cecie Wentworth, met me halfway down the slope. She was sweating and panting, as if she’d been running. I knew she’d climbed up from the beach.

“She’s got on a
dress
,” Cecie gasped, “and a ribbon in her hair, and shoes! And she’s white as a sheet and she gets tears in her eyes when she talks to you.
If
she talks to you. So far she hasn’t talked to anybody but the boys. They’re reacting like flies caught in honey. It’s really awful! What are we going to do with her all summer?”

“Nothing,” I said, hugging her. I had not seen her since last summer; she went to Holton Arms and our crowds didn’t overlap. In fact, I’m not sure we would have even liked each other if they had. Cecie was tall and willowy and going-to-be-pretty-but-not-yet, and an accomplished equestrienne. We could not have been less alike. But what we had together was Carter’s Cove, and the breathing reach, and the rocks and the pointed firs and the sun and the winds and the birds that rode them, and when we saw each other for the first time each June, we clamped together with the same sharp little click that those Scottie dogs, the black-and-white ones with magnets, did. After that, no one could have parted us. A best friend is as crucial to a child as air to breathe and food to eat. A child’s heart and mind are not yet deep and dark enough to hold secrets. They must be shared, or they will implode.

“We can pretend we don’t see her,” Cecie said. “Just look right through her all summer. ‘What girl? I don’t see any girl.’”

“Our mothers would kill us,” I said. “We need to do secret stuff. Stuff nobody sees us do, so we can’t get blamed for it.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like putting spiders in her bed. I know where there’s some wolf spiders back in the woods as big as pancakes.”

“Do they bite?”

“Well, I guess they bite something; they have to eat. I don’t think they bite people, though. But they’re hairy. And they jump.”

Cecie shuddered.

“Wouldn’t just plain old short-sheeting do? I learned how to do that at camp.”

“Not good enough. We could take her kayaking and give her Jeebs’s old kayak. It’s got a slow leak that you can’t see, but it fills up pretty quick. We can always say we didn’t know.”

“What if she can’t swim?”

“Well, we can haul her out and half drown her in the process and still get credit for being heroes. Yeah. I like that.”

“We’ll probably think of some other good stuff as the summer goes on,” Cecie said. “Meanwhile, let’s just be sweet as sugar and cut out of there as fast as we can. Daddy said he heard the ospreys are back over on Sunderson’s. There are babies.”

“Yeah. That’s what I heard, too. I think most of the boys will come with us. Peachie-Pie probably won’t want to get her dress dirty, so she’ll be stuck with the old Davenports. They can look at those old pictures you put in the what’s-it.”

On the rare occasions when Mrs. Davenport was forced to include children at one of her occasions, she herded them into the big screened porch and gave them ancient photographs of unknown Davenports on long-ago vacations in places like the pyramids of Egypt, or Niagara Falls, that one looked at through a viewing contraption you held up to your eyes. We had all seen them a myriad of times. It was considered extreme punishment.

We stumbled down toward the base of the cliff, scattering stones as we went. Wilma cut off the path, nose in the sedge, snuffling after some unseen wild creature. I didn’t call him back; he had never caught anything.

We slid out onto the stony beach and looked up toward Edgewater. There was a small group of people on the lawn, both children and grown-ups. The umbrella table had been set up, and Clara was coming down from the terrace bearing a cake plate. Laughter hung in the water-clear air.

“Let ’em eat cake,” I muttered.

My mother saw us and gestured.

“Come on, you two. Peaches has been waiting to meet you.”

“I just bet,” Cecie said.

We climbed over the little cliff path and swung our legs over the seawall and walked barefoot through the cool, silky early-summer grass toward the group. They were in a circle, grown-ups at the rear, my crowd and Jeebs at the front. They were all laughing and chattering, even the twins, who rarely ever laughed. Even the older Davenports. My father stood behind my mother, smiling a little bemusedly. He saw us and grinned. There was something in the grin that I didn’t know.

When we reached the circle, I could see that a girl sat in its center on one of our Adirondack chairs that were sparkling green with the new paint Seth or Clara had administered, as they did every year. The first thing you noticed was her hair. It looked like a fire on her head, a conflagration of strawberry blond–dark gold in the morning sun. It hung in ringlets to her shoulders, which were bare and gardenia white in her blue-flowered sundress. The rest of her was white, too, satiny, sunless, perfect white, unblemished by scabs and scars and smears of Maine dirt. Her small white feet, with tiny, iridescent toenails, were slipped into blue leather sandals that matched her dress. Her hands, similarly pristine, were clasped loosely in her lap. She lifted her head at our approach, and I could see why they called her Peaches. She was exquisite, like a Titian miniature, her skin delicately flushed with apricot, her mouth like a little strawberry, just ripened. She had the bluest eyes and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen. When she smiled, twin dimples studded her cheeks. Her teeth were pearls.

My hatred flamed and danced.

“Peaches,” my mother said, “the dirtiest one is my daughter, Lilly, and that’s her friend Cecie Wentworth. I wish I could say that they don’t usually look this way, but in fact they do. Girls, this is Peaches Davenport.”

“H’lo,” Cecie and I mumbled.

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” Peaches said. Her voice was like a little bell. “I’ve heard so much about you. Grandmother and Grandfather told me you were just my age. I think I’ll be going to school with you this fall at Cathedral. I went to a French school at home . . .”

Her voice faltered and the incredible eyes filmed over with a sheen of tears. She looked down at her hands.

We all remembered the tragedy then. It would have been hard to forget it. Sympathetic murmurs from the grown-ups hung in the air, and the boys in my crowd cleared their throats and moved closer to her. They were mesmerized, as though Peaches were a cobra.

She looked up again, brightly, though small tears still trembled on her eyelashes.

“Well . . . good,” I said, lamely.

“Actually, I go to Holton Arms,” Cecie said pleasantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Peaches said. “But I’ll bet it’s a good school. Like Cathedral, almost.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cecie said in a voice I had never heard, dry and puckered. “Almost.”

Clara set down the cake, a splendid one, angel cake frosted with chocolate and adorned with strawberries, and Mother said, “Now, who’s ready for some cake?”

The boys surged toward the table, and then stopped and looked at Peaches. She did not move from her chair.

“Clara,” Mother said, “if you’ll just slice it, I think one of the boys will be glad to take a piece to Peaches. The rest of us can serve ourselves. And there’s lemonade, too.”

“I’ll get it,” several boys’ voices chorused.

“I’ve got it,” a deeper voice said. Jeebs. Jeebs, looking at Peaches Davenport as if she were something perfect and Pythagorean. And he got a plate of cake and a glass of lemonade and brought it to Peaches and put it down on the arm of her chair.

“Why, thank you . . . is it Jeebs? Why do they call you that?” she asked, smiling her pointed kitten’s smile up at him.

“It’s my initials,” Jeebs said, blushing maroon. I stared. I had never seen Jeebs blush in my life. “GBS, for George Bayard Semmes.”

“Semmes?” Peaches raised a silky eyebrow. “Aren’t you a Constable? I thought . . .”

“I have three surnames,” Jeebs said, going from maroon to the black-red of an old-fashioned velvet drape.

“Oh, how wonderful,” Peaches trilled. “I’ve never known anybody with three names before. Nobody will ever forget you, will they?”

Jeebs choked.

None of my crowd had even acknowledged Cecie and me. I said, in a voice that sounded false and silly even to me, “Hey, y’all, the ospreys are back on Sunderson's and they’ve got babies. Let’s sail over there after lunch and see them.”

I waited for the chorus of enthusiastic agreement. None came. Somehow, over the past two summers, I had become something of the group’s leader, daring to go places, do things, that some of the others, perhaps, would not. It was not a conscious thing; it was just that somehow, during the years of gymnastics with my father in the basement at home, I had lost fear. Where I led, the children of Carter’s Cove usually followed. Their silence puzzled and then stung, as I understood it.

“I mean Peaches, too,” I said.

“Oh, my dear . . . boats? I think it’s a little soon for Peaches to try boats,” old Mrs. Davenport said. “I had thought you young people might come over after lunch and look at the slides Peaches made of her vacation in Europe last summer. They’re really lovely—Paris and London and Rome, and the Riviera, and all the castles on the Rhine.”