Off Season (9 page)

“You are an officer and a gentleman, Jon,” he said. “You’ve probably saved my summer. A lot of people’s summer, for that matter.”

“No problem,” Jon said, and whistled to the dripping, capering Wilma, who followed him, gamboling, up the gangplank and to the dirt road that bound all our cottages together, and out of sight.

As we reached the seawall, a pretty woman with Jon’s yellow hair tied back in a ponytail and freckles on her snub nose asked, “Where is that son of mine?”

“He’s taking Wilma over to your house, Mrs. Lowell,” I said. “If you don’t mind, he’ll probably stay with y’all a lot this summer.”

“Not at all. Charles and Gordon will love to have company.”

“Charles and Gordon?”

“Our two dogs. I know. It’s ridiculous. Don’t ask.”

She smiled, and all of a sudden I liked her very much.

She cupped her hands and raised her voice.

“Jon?”

“Yes ma’am?” came floating faintly back from the direction of the road.

“Take a quick bath and change your clothes. You looked like a pirate getting out of that boat.”

“Yes ma’am,” he called back.

“You too, Lilly,” my mother said, not smiling. I knew she was annoyed at my lateness and my bedraggled shorts and hair. “We’re going inside now and will light the fire. I always forget how quickly it still gets chilly in June. Hurry up—I need you to pass some things for me.”

The canon was standing next to a tall, darkly tanned man with Jon’s planed features but somehow without his light. Jon’s father, I knew.

“Where is he taking that dog?” the canon said forbiddingly. Behind him, Peaches gave a great rattling sniff, but did not scream anymore.

“He’s taking him over to our place, Canon Davenport,” Jon’s mother said. “We’ve got a huge fenced dog pen and two big idiots of dogs who’ll love to have a new playmate.”

“More big dogs? I hope they can’t jump that fence,” the canon said.

“Not unless they have wings,” Mrs. Lowell said sweetly, smiling at Peaches, who was edging out from behind her grandfather. She was all in white tonight, and seemed dipped in pearl, nacreous like, I thought ungenerously, the inside of a dead oyster’s shell. Her apricot hair brushed her shoulders.

“Hey Lilly,” she said. “My goodness, did you-all have an accident?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, I mean you’re so wet and all, and you’ve got this green stuff all over your shorts—”

“I know what you mean,” I said, and turned and went across the chilly lawn and into the house, shaking with anger.

“Peaches, dear, it’s not really kind to remark on people’s appearances,” I could hear Mrs. Davenport start sweetly. I did not hear Peaches reply. I could imagine it, though.

It is almost always dark in the old cottages in Retreat and Carter’s Cove. Very few of them have ever been winterized, so that the walls and ceilings are of dark pine boards and beams, without insulation or plaster. I always loved Edgewater best at this time of day. All those years of long winters and smoke from our many fireplaces had stained the old pine a beautiful, dark honey gold, and the last of the fire from the dying sunset down the reach burned pure gold on them.

By that summer, a few wealthy people from Boston and New York had found the colony, and had bought up seaside land down the Naskeag Road and built huge, rambling houses that cost nearly a million dollars and sent everybody’s taxes skyrocketing. They were not loved, nor were the cottages. They did not look like cottages. They looked like big, rich suburban houses. I had never been in one, though I think my parents had, once or twice, for drinks and dinner. I knew I would hate them. Insulated and plastered and painted against the Maine winters, they had no glowing, smoky gold walls that smelled of all the fires of summer, no narrow, dim staircases and dark magical corners.

I ran up our steep, creaking stairs to the second-floor bathroom that Jeebs and I shared reluctantly and took a very brief, bone-chilling bath, then jumped out of the old claw-footed tub and toweled myself dry and raw. Everyone else had had baths, I thought; the hot water was feeble, and died soon. I ran into my room, purple with cold, and reached for my clean shorts and a sweater, and then stopped. In the back of my closet I found the single skirt I had at Edgewater, a flowing, paisley affair my mother had bought me, remarking that if someone died or got married at least I’d have something besides pants. I put it back. Besides loathing the skirt, I was damned if I would put on a skirt just because Peaches Davenport had one on. I rummaged for a moment in the faded, clean clothes, most of which had been left in my closet here year after year, and then stopped. My hand felt a silky linen, unlike anything I was apt to have, and pulled out the beautifully tailored white linen pants my mother had bought for me, too. They were crisp and fell perfectly. I had hidden and then forgotten them as I had the skirt. I took them out and put them on. Then I found the heavy navy turtleneck cable-knit sweater that had been a present from my Constable grandmother one Christmas, which I had never worn because it scratched. I pulled it over my head and then went into my mother’s room to look at myself in her full-length mirror.

I did not know the person who looked back. She was slender where I had been knobby, softly curved where I was flat, very nearly elegant. I goggled. I pushed at my unruly curls and then went to my mother’s dresser and took out one of her white headbands and bound my hair back with it, and looked again. For a moment I thought I was looking at my mother. I did not know how to feel about this, so I poked at my hair some more until tendrils broke free from the band and curled onto my cheeks. My face was tanned, and flushed with sunburn from the afternoon. Gingerly I picked up my mother’s single lipstick, a hectic pink, from her dresser and dabbed it on my mouth. I looked grotesque, like a flesh-eating Kewpie doll, so I wiped it off. But a faint stain remained, and I smoothed a little cold cream over it, and turned and ran out of the room and started downstairs. Then I went back and slid my feet into my mother’s white espadrilles. They fit perfectly. Not knowing in the least who I was, I crept downstairs and into the living room.

Except for the clothes everyone wore, I might have been walking into the room as it had been fifty or sixty years ago. My father, sentimentally, had never allowed many changes at Edgewater, so the room was full of spavined old wicker armchairs, faded blowsy chintz settees, fussy, tottering little tables, and two or three small, frayed Oriental rugs that had been old when my grandmother brought them to the cottage. On shelves and the mantel of the stone fireplace sat china trinkets and dried flowers and brownish photos in curly frames that showed people in long skirts and hats and high-buttoned suits on the decks of steamers, or at what seemed to be dances in fern-filled drawing rooms; there were a few grim portraits of no one I knew, and a shot of two people in 1890s dress posing on the colony’s little clay tennis court with racquets poised, smiling for the camera. My father insisted they were his mother and father, but my mother demurred. “Your mother never picked up a tennis racquet in her life except to smack a bug.”

In only two instances had my mother stood firm. “We are going to have one comfortable place to sit,” she said, “and this house is going to have light in it.”

So the huge tartan sofa came, before I was born, I think, for I seemed to remember it always, and solid, simple lamps sat about, making pools of light in the black-gold dusk and warming corners and chairs and tables and faces sweetly. Of all the rooms in my life, it was this one I loved the most.

The fire snickered and whispered. My father was just bringing out a fresh tray of drinks, and something baking in the kitchen smelled wonderful. Everyone looked at me when I entered. Conversation stopped.

Then my mother said, “Why, Lilly. How nice you look.”

There were murmurs from the other adults, and from Peaches, “Isn’t that a winter sweater? Gosh, you must be burning up.”

“You looked so much like your mother for a moment it was almost frightening,” my father said, smiling at me.

In the corner by the fire, with Peaches planted firmly at his feet, Jon, in fresh khakis and a blue oxford-cloth shirt, said, “Wow.”

My face flamed, but I thought that the dancing firelight would mask it. I walked over to the end of the sofa and sat down beside my father. “It’s really nice to have you all here,” I said.

My mother and father stared. “Nice going,” my father whispered to me. My mother introduced me to Jon’s parents, Claire and Arthur Lowell.

“But I guess you’ve figured that out already,” Mrs. Lowell said. “Jon is the spitting image of his father, and thank God for that. Arthur always says I look like a little yellow hen, and no boy needs that.” She smiled fondly at Jon, who gave her a brief, sweet smile and moved his leg surreptitiously to dislodge Peaches’ cheek from it. I looked at his mother incredulously. Jon looked like his father? I looked again. Arthur Lowell was tall, bronzed, with abundant chestnut hair and sculpted features that were, I could see now, rather like Jon’s. But his eyes were dark brown, almost opaque, and his dark brows were thick and straight over them. Jon’s eyes were the dancing diamond blue of his mother’s. I would never have thought that there was a resemblance to this dusky man if his mother had not pointed it out. Lean, erect, still almost to the point of stiffness, Jon’s father reminded me of nothing so much as a high-ranking military officer.

“It’s nice to meet the young temptress who had my son out all day long.” He smiled at me. I blushed. Jon made a soft strangled noise. Peaches sniffed.

“I just told everybody about your afternoon with the eagle and the ospreys,” my father said. “You’re lucky, Jon. You’ll remember that all your life.”

“Yeah,” Jon said, “I truly will.”

“What was the eagle going to do?” Peaches asked querulously.

“He was going to eat the baby ospreys,” I said. “Eagles will grab almost anything small that’s moving and fly off with them. I’ve even heard they eat babies,” I said, smiling sweetly at her.

“Lilly,” my mother said. “That’s an old wives’ tale and you know it.”

“Well, I’ve heard it a lot,” I said. “And I’ve seen our eagle stalking things.”

“Your eagle?” Peaches whispered.

“Yeah. He stays in those big pines out on the rocks. We see him a lot.”

Peaches edged closer to her grandfather on her other side. “Does he come out in daylight?” she quavered.

“Sometimes, sweetie,” my mother said. “But he’s a young eagle, almost a baby, and there’s no way he could pick up a kitten, even. You don’t have anything to worry about as far as he’s concerned. He’s very beautiful, in fact.”

“I don’t want to see him, Grandpa,” Peaches said in a small, fretful voice.

“Well,” her grandmother said, “we’ll be going to visit all the places I told you about, mostly, so you won’t see him. No eagles at Jordan Pond, or in Bar Harbor, or at that pretty sandy beach on Mount Desert. No eagles at the beautiful flower gardens or the museums and stores.” She lifted her face and looked at me, and then Jon.

“You missed Peaches’ lovely slide show this afternoon,” she said, “but we hope you’ll come with us to tea at Jordan Pond tomorrow afternoon. Most of the other children are going.”

“I told Jon we’d take the bicycles and ride up to Caterpillar Hill tomorrow,” I said. “But of course, if he would rather—”

“Did you enjoy sailing today, Jon?” my father asked hastily.

“Oh, man! I’d really love to learn,” Jon said.

“We heard they gave lessons at the club in the colony yacht,” Jon’s mother said. “I thought I’d call tomorrow.”

“Let George teach him,” my mother said quickly. “That idiot steward at the club couldn’t sail a rubber ducky in a bathtub. George has won most of the sailing awards we give over the years, but he’s just about stopped competing.”

“Got too vicious for me.” My father smiled. “But I’d be more than glad to teach Jon, if you’d like. Our Beetle Cat is the perfect boat to learn in.”

“That would be great!” Jon said.

“It’s very generous of you,” his mother said warmly. “We want him to learn. But I would like him to meet some of the colony young people. I mean, if we buy here . . .”

“I don’t want to right now, Mom,” Jon said. “I don’t even know the ones around here yet. Well, except Lilly—”

“You know me,” Peaches chimed, and smiled winsomely.

In the firelight she really was lovely. I looked over at Jon, and the sheer beauty of him struck me silent. What a pair they would make.

“We’re anxious for Peaches to make a lot of new little friends, too,” Mrs. Davenport said. “I know the Randolphs and the Simmonses, and Ambassador Fielding and his family are at the colony, and there are several little girls Peaches should know. I think the ambassador’s granddaughter Shirley is going to Cathedral next year. Not that the Carter’s Cove children aren’t perfectly charming.”

“Well,” my mother said, “I think I heard there are dances every Wednesday night.”

“Oh, I
love
to dance,” Peaches cried. “I took lessons at home, and I’m going to Mrs.—what’s her name, Grandma?”

“Miss Walker,” her grandmother said. “The Shippens’ granddaughter, you know. All the Washington children go. I’m sure you and George Junior go, don’t you, Lilly?”

“Jeebs goes,” I said shortly. Guns, knives, cannons, missiles could not drive me to Miss Walker’s notorious dancing school.

“But you don’t?”

“No,” I said, and then, “My father and I have a real gymnasium in our basement, with trapezes and high bars and everything. That’s what we do. We’re good, too.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Peaches trilled. “You’re a circus!”

“The dances are square dances,” I said. “You know, like hillbillies do.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Davenport said. “Not like junior cotillions, then.”

“We’re pretty rustic down here,” my mother said, smiling.

“Bucolic,” Jon’s father said. “Just what we all need. Jon’s been hitting the balls pretty hard this year.”

“You’re a tennis player, I hear,” the canon said magisterially to Jon. “I used to play a bit myself.”

The thought of Canon Davenport playing tennis with anyone but God was patently absurd. I looked at Jon. In the firelight his face was still, his eyes shuttered by his gold-tipped lashes.