But I was not sure. I would have given much to be able to talk to Amy about these doubts and fears, but Parker had taken her with him on a business trip to Hong Kong, and they would not be at Braebonnie until the middle of July.
There was no one else I would dream of talking with in Retreat. Out of nowhere, once, the image of Micah Willis’s dark face swam into my mind, and I knew that if I had had access to Micah I would not have hesitated to talk with him. But of course I did not, and would not. That much was understood after he brought me home under the eyes of the Misses Valentine last summer.
In our second week, Peter and Old Micah put the
Hannah
into the water, and after that I was alone in the sunny morning stillness of the sun porch.
“You sure you don’t care?” Peter said, vibrating at the door in his eagerness to get out onto the dancing blue bay.
“No. Really. Go on. I’d far rather have you out there and know you’re happy than stuck here. I can’t go anywhere anyway.”
“See you tonight,” he said, and kissed me, and was gone.
After that, the hours of confinement chafed painfully. I found myself wishing the baby would be premature, so that we could get it over and I could be on my feet again, and then I felt miserable and guilty about the wishing. It was, on the whole, beginning to be a bad time.
At the beginning of the third week my father-in-law came out onto the sun porch and found me crying.
“Maude, dear! What is it? Are you ill? Should I fetch Ridley Lincoln?”
I had never heard his voice so agitated. Poor man, I suppose he thought he was alone with a woman about to give birth. I gave him a watery smile and shook my head.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “That’s just the problem, Papa Chambliss. I feel wonderful, and I haven’t been off this chaise for three weeks except to go to bed. I’m sorry, I know everyone thinks this is the best way, but I’m used to the out-doors. I miss the woods. Oh, I miss the water so much—”
I stopped, feeling my voice break. I truly did not wish to distress him. He had been silent and withdrawn much of June; I had scarcely seen him. I felt as if a scene with me might be the feather that tipped him irrevocably into his blackness.
He sat down and took my hand in his and squeezed it absently, and I looked at him in surprise. Except for ritual cheek kisses, he had never touched me. He did not notice; he was looking out over the water. The bay was calm and misted; you could not tell where it ended and the sky began. It was warm on the porch for June.
He turned his head back to me and smiled, and I smiled involuntarily in return, he looked so much like my Peter.
“Then you shall have the water,” he said. “Tell me where your sweater is; I’m going to take you for a little drive. It’s a part of Retreat you haven’t seen before. I think you’ll find it very lovely.”
“But Mother Hannah—” I began.
“I will deal with Hannah,” he said, still smiling. “It’s time I spent some time with my daughter-in-law, before she makes me a grandfather again. It’s not easy to be a newcomer in Retreat, my dear. I wish Hannah could remember that more often. She was in your place once.”
He brought out the big Marmon touring car in
which he and Mother Hannah motored to Maine each year and installed me in the front seat. We bumped out of Liberty’s driveway and up the lane, past the cutoff down to Braebonnie and the smaller lane that led down to Mary’s Garden, Fir Cottage, and Land’s End. We were almost to the main road into the village when he stopped the car and got out and held back a great armful of leaning rhododendrons and unlatched a silver-weathered gate. There was no sign, no mailbox, no indication of any kind that another lane lay behind the sheltering rhododendron, but I could see that one did. It twisted away through the dense pine and spruce and birch forest, a mere ghost of a white sand ribbon in the green gloom. I would never have known it was there. I wondered how many people did.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as we bumped slowly down the lane. Vegetation leaned so close around the car that we literally pushed our way through it in the Marmon. My voice had dropped to a whisper. In that green stillness, a normal human voice would have seemed a shout.
“To see a very old friend of mine, who has the best view of the water on the cape and who will, I think, be interested in meeting you. I believe you’ll like her too.”
My father-in-law’s face was calm and affable, but there was something in his eyes and voice, something of secrets and pleasure. It reminded me of a child’s, near Christmas.
Suddenly I knew.
“It’s the Aerie, isn’t it?” I said. “I’ve seen just a glimpse of it from the rocks below Braebonnie. Amy told me about the people who live there: the Fowlers? She said Mrs. Fowler was an invalid, and that no one ever saw them—”
“It’s the Aerie, yes.” He smiled over at me. “Sarah and Douglas Fowler. Not many people see them, but
a few do. I’ve known Sarah since we were children; the house was her family’s. Douglas came here the summer they married and loved it, and when she got ill he just kept on bringing her back for the season. It seems to do her good. Sarah has always been passionate about the woods and sea.”
“Does she…is she very ill?” I asked. I thought it odd that he would intrude on a sick woman, no matter how old a friend.
“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “Most of the time I can see virtually no change from the way she always was. Sometimes she doesn’t talk, but she never did, very much. I know she is glad to see me; I wouldn’t go if I thought she was not.”
I said nothing; was he in the habit of visiting in this forbidden place, then? When did he come? I had thought he went in the mornings over to the camp on Rosier Pond, but perhaps I had misunderstood. My Peter had never mentioned the Fowlers.
He looked at me again, reading my confusion.
“Sarah’s sickness is called schizophrenia,” he said. “Or at least that’s the name her doctors have for it. She lost three babies in a row, and after the third she just seemed to drift away inside her head, and she stays there a good part of the time. When she’s…with us, she’s almost as normal as she ever was, though she has a tendency to say exactly what comes into her mind, which as you may imagine is a perilous business in a place like Retreat. They could probably go out far more than they do, but Sarah always did hate the social part of our summers. I think on the main she lives precisely the way she wishes to.”
“I hope I’m not going to upset her,” I said anxiously. All at once, dealing with more nuance and uncertainty in this place seemed beyond me. Poor woman: all three of her babies dead, and me obviously, heavily, pregnant.
“No. She wants to meet you. I’ve told her a bit about you.
She says she thinks you and she have much in common. She knows about your baby, if that worries you.”
We came out of the tunnel of green and into a land and seascape that made me gasp. The great brown-shingled house sat on the very lip of a cliff, in a clearing surrounded by dense forest and looking straight out to sea. On three sides it hung in blue air, gulls wheeling above and below, and the wind, that had only teased fitfully down at Liberty, boomed in here like a whoop of joy. I had the swift, absurd notion that if you lived in this house, in this place, you would know how to fly. Far, far beyond us, Isle au Haut and North Haven dreamed, and beyond them the Camden Hills. Sails lay like confetti on all that wild, vast blue. One of them, I knew, was Peter’s. Around the foundations of the house flowers rioted, and a railed staircase led over the cliff and out of sight.
Everything was elemental: sun, sea, wind, rock. I wanted to cry for sheer joy.
“Is this enough water for you?” Big Peter said, smiling at my rapt face and open mouth.
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Oh, it’s glorious! Oh, my.”
A man came down the steps toward us, an old man, I thought at first, and then saw he was no older than my father-in-law but was stooped and frail and seemed somehow bleached. But his smile was warm.
“You can see why we call it the Aerie,” Douglas Fowler said, when I had been introduced.
“I’d call it heaven,” I said honestly. “I don’t think I’d ever leave.”
And then I reddened furiously because, of course, they did not. But he only said, “Sarah feels the same way you do. The only time I’ve ever seen her cry is when we go back to Vermont every September.”
Not even for her babies? I thought. But of course I did not say it.
Inside, a great room ran the length of the house and looked through a wall of many-paned windows out over a stone terrace and scrap of lawn and then the wild, all-dissolving blue. I thought you could do anything necessary to sustain life in that room, and they probably did: eat, sleep, work, play, love. At one end a huge blackened fireplace flanked by bookcases and window seats occupied an entire wall, with fat, spraddled sofas and chairs and ottomans grouped about it. At the other end stood a round oak dining table and chairs.
An easel was set up by the window wall, and a little farther down a brass telescope trained out to sea. There were old black beams far up in the rafters, and a gallery all around the second story with, I assumed, bedrooms and baths off it.
Bright rugs and cushions and afghans and books and papers and magazines were scattered everywhere, and flowers glowed from tables and the mantelpiece. A fire burned on the hearth, and on the shabby old plaid rug before it two massive Scotties dozed.
“When I die, this is where I hope I come,” I said to Douglas Fowler, and he laughed, and so did someone else. I looked quickly around the room and saw no one, and then I did.
She stood behind the sofa table, at the entrance to the foyer through which we had just come, and the first thing I thought was, Dear God, she’s a ghost. I have never seen anyone alive as pale as Sarah Fowler was. She was, in the gloom of the huge room, nearly transparent.
The second thing I thought was, But she’s beautiful! And she was that, too. Tall and seeming taller because of her extreme thinness, she had the bones of a deer or a whippet and the face of a classical statue. You see that face on women on medieval tombs, a little greyhound curled at their feet.
“You brought your little runaway, I see,” she said to Big Peter, and smiled at me, and walked over and kissed him on the cheek. Her face was fine and bloodless and sweet, her eyes spilling light, her hair a wash of pewter watercolor down her back. She seemed all over silver. He put his hand lightly on her hair, just a touch, as if to brush it off her cheek, and suddenly I knew he loved her as a man does a woman—and had, for a very long time. With the swift prescience that comes at such times, I knew also that she loved him too, and her pale husband knew it, and none of the three would ever speak of it. I could not have said how I knew, but that sort of knowledge has come to me a few times in my life, as if on a very breath, and each time I have been sure past any certainty it was true, and it has been. I could have wept with the hopelessness of that kiss and that touch on the silver hair, there in the madwoman’s living room.
But Sarah Fowler smiled in real delight, and took my hands, and said, “I asked Peter to bring you to me when I heard about Ridley Lincoln’s putting you to bed. Old fool.
Of course you must be up and out in the sun; of course you must have the sea. It’s what healed me when…I was sick. It will keep you well. I want you to go down that flight of steps to the beach and just sit there and let it all wash over you, while I have a talk with Peter and Douglas runs into the village. When you’re quite full up, come on back and we’ll have a cup of tea.”
“Sarah, I don’t know about Maude going down all those steps alone—” Big Peter began, but she put her finger to her lips and he stopped.
“It’s the solitude she needs, Peter. Believe me, I know.
There is magic here, but it needs solitude to work.”
“Please,” I said, suddenly frantic to be off down the stairs to the sea, dying of my thirst for the water.
He nodded, and I was out the French doors and
across the terrace in an eye blink, into the stream of the wind.
It caught me and washed over me like water itself, cool and damp and smelling of pine and salt and distance and dark, secret green places, and I threw out my arms and laughed aloud and rode the wind down the steps on the face of the cliff to the beach and the sea.
It was in all ways a secret beach, a perfect little half moon of sighing shingle, with great, beetling pink boulders shielding it on both sides and, above it, the cliff top and the house and the sky. No one not in that house would ever know you were there. No eyes or voices could follow you. No tongues could tell of your being here. I stood there alone, washed and washed with sea and solitude and the salt wind, and then I pulled up my skirt and waded into the water.
It was light green and cold as iced seltzer, bubbling and fizzing, and as terrible as it had felt to me last summer, it was that wonderful now. The shelf of sand beneath the water was level and gradual, and I waded and splashed and stooped and swooped cold water onto my face and arms, and I capered and kicked and sang.
“ ‘Yes, we have no bananas,’ ” I shouted. “ ‘We have no bananas today,’ ” and “ ‘I been working on the railroad, all the livelong day,’ ” and “ ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning, we’ve danced the whole night through.’ ”
And suddenly I was a creature of lightness and grace again, a girl who might, indeed, dance the whole night through with the man who had brought her armfuls of lilacs. The sun was shining and the water lapped and dreamed, and I was young, and all things seemed possible. I will remember that morning on the beach below the Aerie as long as I live.
After I finished wading, I found a sun-warmed hollow in the great, tumbling pile of rock and sat down and closed my eyes and let the wind and sun and sea run into me through my skin, until no conscious thought
was left and I could not have told where my boundaries were, or the sea’s, or the sky’s. The baby was very still, and there was a high humming in my ears that seemed the very music of the earth itself. I think I slept a little. When I heard my father-in-law calling me, the sun was a bit higher overhead and my cheekbones and nose were beginning to sting. Leaving that beach was one of the hardest things I have ever done.