“Do you ever regret not going to school?” I said.
“Sometimes, I guess,” he said, looking off to the water, a white glitter now in the noonday. “But usually not. Willises have always had some land and a house, whatever else they didn’t have. We’ve always owned our own doorsteps. I don’t think we could have kept what we had here if I’d left, and it wouldn’t have been worth it to me in the long run. We’re not too smart; we’ve always been willing to sacrifice anything we had, to keep our land and our
homes. There’ll be none of us rich. Maybe that boy up there will be the one to cut and run. But somehow I don’t think so.”
“You’re just like my family,” I said. “Or rather, mine is just like yours. My family has hung on to its big old place in the swamp since the 1700s too; you’d think land was the holy grail to us. Isn’t that funny? I’m even French like your wife.
My family’s name is Gascoigne. I didn’t think I’d ever find a soul up here I had anything in common with.”
“You still haven’t,” he said crisply. “A French last name isn’t enough, by a long stretch.”
I was silent for a space, my face smarting with the sting of his rebuff. For a time I had forgotten we were employer and employee; we had been, in my eyes, only two people with a commonality, if a slender one. The ease had been palpable.
“You all don’t like us much, do you?” I said. “Us summer people, I mean?”
“Well, it’s mainly that you don’t work, you see,” he said seriously, and I thought he was sorry he had spoken sharply but would never tell me so. “We see you up here in your big houses and your automobiles and sailboats, but we never see you lift a finger. Mainiacs are keen on working.”
“Well, most of us work the rest of the year,” I said, wondering why I was defending these people who were, to me, such alien corn. “Some of us work up here. My father-in-law is working on a book on birds and flowers. My husband works on his lesson plans. Lots of the women work like demons in their flower beds.”
“Flower beds. What kind of work is that? That’s fussing around to make themselves think they’re working. How do you suppose our women feel, seeing the way you live up here? Working for you in your houses? Saying yes, ma’am; no, ma’am? How do you think our men feel, seeing their women doing it? Or our children?”
“You don’t have to do it, do you?” I said, annoyed.
“No,” he said. “We don’t. It’s just that most of us are fond of eating in the winters. You cannot imagine what a winter here is like if you’ve never seen one. Or seen one in one of our houses, I mean. Big difference from staying over a few days in one of those big winterized jobs your folks have.”
“They’re not my folks,” I said. “Not really. My folks are just as poor, and probably just as stubborn as yours are, if you want to play ‘my poverty is nobler than your poverty.’ I’m more like you than them. I don’t think I ever really saw that until today. I don’t know if I would have, if we hadn’t come out here and talked to each other.”
“Well, you’d do well not to make a habit of that, either,”
he said, looking straight ahead.
“You mean I can’t talk to you any more? Or to Christina or Caleb?”
“It wouldn’t go well for you if you did,” he said. “Your mother-in-law wouldn’t like it. None of those old ladies would. Probably not your husband, either.”
“Don’t you dump Peter in with those…women,” I said hotly. “If you knew anything at all, you’d know he isn’t like them, not at all. And I’ll darned well speak to who I want to. That’s one thing all the old ladies in the entire state of Maine can’t stop me from doing.”
He turned and looked at me. It was a long look, level and assessing. His eyes were very dark, and his mouth a straight line. He looked carved from dark marble. I remembered how warm his body had felt against mine when he had pulled me out of the water. I went suddenly scarlet and hot and turned away.
“You’re not going to do well up here, Maude Chambliss,”
he said. “You see too clearly. You have a foolhardy heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“That sail in the fog. The fawn. My boy.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“That’s true,” he said. “You don’t.”
We got back into the truck and I gathered the sleeping child against me and we swayed on back down the road toward Retreat to deliver me to Liberty. Neither of us said much until we turned off at the place where the old oar beckoned beside the road.
He cleared his throat.
“We are mightily in your debt,” he said. “It’s for your own good that I ask you not to mention today to your family or any of your neighbors. I understand that you acted from a kind heart, and I thank you for it. But others here would not understand that.”
“You mean just not say anything about the accident or any of it?” I said.
“That’s what I mean. Your mother-in-law and Christina aren’t usually back by now, and if you go and change your clothes there’ll be no reason for them to know. Everybody else will be gone to lunch or out on the water. I’ll let you off and go get this sprat to bed. That was good, that about the scar.”
I nodded dumbly, and when he pulled into the driveway of Liberty I saw he was right; none of my family was about.
The entire colony seemed deserted. But when I got out, rumpled and mussed and damp with spring water and still splattered with blood, Miss Isabelle and Miss Charlotte Valentine were just coming out of the cottage, their card cases in their gloved hands. I had a great desire to laugh, to shout, howl, double up with laughter, laugh until I rolled in the lane and choked on my glee. First coral satin and hickies, now rumpled, bloody, grass-stained clothes and Micah Willis’s truck.
“Good morning,” I said to them, as I had said on that other day that seemed a lifetime ago. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
I
n early January of the next year I got pregnant, and so once again the summer world of Retreat narrowed, for me, to the slice of it I could see and smell and hear and taste from the sun porch in Liberty. That second summer we went there, Mother Hannah had me off my feet and under layers of wool almost before I had taken my hat off.
“I really think it most unwise of Peter even to bring you here this summer, but of course he never listens to his mother, and so here you are,” she said, bringing me warm milk and Saltines on the sun porch. I have always loathed both.
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just five months. I may look like a blimp, but I’ve really never felt better in my life. My doctor at home says it’s good for me to get moderate exercise.”
“He’s that young man from somewhere out west, isn’t he?”
she said smoothly. Dr. Canfield from St. Louis, whom Peter and I both liked enormously when I had my first appointment with him in Concord, seemed to diminish in my mind with the speed of light. Mother Hannah was outraged because I would
not agree to come to Boston for six weeks before my due date and have the baby there.
“Missouri,” I said, determined to be equable with her this summer. “And he looks far younger than he is. Really, Mother Hannah. I’m going to feel awful if I have to lie around all summer.”
“We’ll see what Dr. Lincoln says.” She smiled thinly. “I’ve asked him to look in on you tomorrow morning. You cannot be up here in this wilderness in your condition without being under a doctor’s care. I cannot take responsibility for you.”
“I’m sure Peter will be happy to do that,” I said, feeling my just-born equanimity die without taking a breath.
“Peter,” she said, in fond scorn. “What does that happy-go-lucky son of mine know about expectant mothers? I’ve been in your condition twice up here, and Dr. Lincoln has attended me both times. Between us I think we can manage to keep you safe and sound. And that, my dear, means no more running around the cliffs or fooling around in the sea.
Cemeteries either,” she added, pointedly not looking at me.
“I knew I’d hear about that eventually,” I said to Peter that night as we lay in our upstairs bed, properly tucked up under the Great Seal of Princeton. “I wondered why I didn’t get both barrels last summer, when it happened. And as for Dr.
Lincoln: Peter, he’s ancient! They very probably
did
put pregnant women to bed for nine months in his heyday, but Dr. Canfield said—”
“I know,” he said, patting my cheek and then letting his hand slide down my breasts to the mound of my belly.
The baby had been more active than usual that evening; the drive from Northpoint, though we took it in two days rather than one and stopped frequently, was still rough and tedious. His hand bucked with the baby’s kicking.
“I promise you won’t hear any more about oceans and cemeteries. Just give her and Dr. Lincoln their way for a week or two, and then I’ll bet you anything they’ll let up on the bed rest. Though to tell you the truth I’m not at all sorry Junior, here, will be keeping you out of graveyards and oceans this summer.”
I looked it him sharply, but he said no more. He had said nothing about my careening trip to the village and the old cemetery with Micah Willis when it had happened last summer, except to tell his mother calmly that he’d just as soon not be married to a woman who would let a child bleed to death because it was a native. And when she said, “Well, of course I didn’t mean that, I meant the appearance of it, being in that truck alone with Micah,” he fairly snapped at her, so she rounded on him.
“Peter Chambliss, just because you’re a married man now—”
Then Big Peter came out of his den, where he had been sequestered for the past three days, and said, “The appearance of a dead child on your doorstep would, I hope, distress you more, Hannah,” and went back into the den and shut the door, and she turned and went upstairs. I heard nothing more that summer about the incident, but when we left for Northpoint, I felt as though I was coming out of a paradisiacal prison into blessed, ordinary air.
“Peter, can it possibly be good for me or the baby to spend an entire summer being bored and unhappy?” I said, knowing it was emotional blackmail, but not knowing how else to make my point.
“Maude, if you’re truly that miserable up here this summer—if you really and truly are unhappy—we simply won’t come again. That’s a promise. I’m not going to torture you every year of your life. But give it another try this summer.
It’ll be different. She’s going to lay off criticizing you; we had a talk about
that. She’s agreed to try, and she will. You try a little too.
Try to think like she does, just a bit. She’s worked hard to get where she is in the colony; she knows what the rules are.
I truly believe she’s trying to show you what it takes to fit in up here.”
“What good is a place that won’t let you be yourself?” I said sullenly. I was bested, and I knew it. “Do you want your child to grow up always straining to fit somebody else’s mold? Do you want him—or her—to be so fenced in with rules?”
The silvery brows over the gray eyes knitted, and he looked at me, honestly puzzled.
“Why should he be?” he said. “I wasn’t. I’m not. I’ve always been me up here.”
I think I realized only then, clearly and without hope, that in Retreat the men’s supernal freedom had always been bought by the sacrificial chains of the women. Peter truly did not understand what was bothering me.
“Then you better hope this baby is a boy,” I said under my breath, rolling over in bed and trying to find a place in the spavined mattress for my belly. It was a long time that night before I slept.
At first it wasn’t so bad. To no one’s surprise, Dr. Lincoln agreed with Mother Hannah and decreed bed or sun-porch rest for me, but true to her word Mother Hannah did not chastise or instruct me further that summer, and if her company in the afternoons was not exactly stimulating, still, it was soothing and neutral and not unpleasant. She read aloud to me, during the cool clear June afternoons, from books she had read when she was young—
Penrod and Sam, Jane Eyre,
Silas Marner
—and I was surprised to find I soon looked forward to those few hours before I was sent back up to bed for the nap I did not need. In the mornings, when she and Christina were on their errands, Peter sat with me on the sun porch, grading papers
and reading over fall assignments. His vocation for teaching was a real one; he was endlessly interested in the minds of young boys and endlessly convinced of the importance of what was put into them. Sometimes we talked of the baby, but abstractedly, not as speculatively as one might think prospective young parents would. I know for Peter’s part only that he was bemusedly charmed with the idea of parent-hood but seemingly unconcerned with its reality. He would not talk of formulas and nurses and the logistics of living with a small child. He would talk, instead, of when the baby was grown: what work he would choose, what sort of man he would be, what his odd Boston-Charleston provenance would mean to him. And often he would say, looking at me and pantomiming lewdness, “That kid has pumped the old pillows up there pretty good, Mrs. C. Are you sure we couldn’t, just once—”
“Dr. Lincoln says not,” I would say.
“May Dr. Lincoln rot in hell. Easy for him to prescribe ab-stinence. He probably forgot what it felt like twenty years ago.”
For my part, I simply could not see past the moment that my pains would start. It seemed to me somehow that I would have the pains and go to the hospital and there deflate like a balloon and come home and resume my old life once more.
The fact that the rubbery, elastic mound in my stomach was going to turn us both into different people for the rest of our lives was simply, that summer, beyond my comprehension.
I was still learning how to be a wife, still learning to be some sort of daughter-in-law. Surely the role of mother would not be asked of me as well. Not really. I worried endlessly, in those days, that I would be unable to love the baby.
Once I said as much to Peter.
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard of,” he said. “Of course you will. It comes with the baby.”
“Did you love Peter the minute you saw him?” I asked Mother Hannah.
“Instantly,” she said. “It was the holiest rapture I have ever felt. We are given it with our children, I am sure of that.”