For the rest of the summer Peter was someone I did not know.
He was silent and distracted, and away more than he was there. When he and Mother Hannah got back from Boston he spent one night prowling restlessly about the cottage and then took the
Hannah
out for three days. Busy with her stream of visitors and thank-you notes and the minutiae of her new queenship, Mother Hannah hardly seemed to notice his absence. She thrust me smartly back into quarantine on the sun porch and left me with embroidery and yellowing novels, and without my husband or my father-in-law I had no friend at court to help me escape the chaise and the blankets. I lay there, as lonely and alien as I have ever felt, out of the mainstream of the constant flow of women, and wondered if there would ever be anything in this beautiful, sharp-edged place that was mine alone.
“I miss Peter,” I said to her once, when she asked if I was all right.
“Well, you’d better find a way to accept these little trips of his,” she said. “He’s always handled his difficulties like this.
He’s sensitive and needs his time alone. His father did it too.
We must remember, we women, that this place is really for the men, to help them find the strength they need for their work. When you look at it like that, I’m sure you won’t mind that he goes for a little sail by himself every now and then.”
But I did mind. Peter’s little sails became more and more frequent and lasted longer and longer. I grew larger and clumsier and tireder and unhappier, and the
baby dropped low, waiting, I thought, to be born. I told myself that soon it would be time to go home to Northpoint, and in the fall my baby would be born, and then I would surely have Peter back, and all would be well again. I had only to wait. Only to wait….
But I did not wait long enough, it seemed. On the second week in August, while Peter was away on the
Hannah
far around Naskeag Point and up into Blue Hill Bay, I went suddenly and violently into labor, and it was Micah Willis who drove me those endless jolting miles to the Castine hospital instead of my husband, and Mother Hannah who held me in her arms in the back seat, bracing me against the bumps, Mother Hannah whose voice told me, over and over, “It will be all right. I’m here.”
It was a long grinding labor, and I was blinded with sweat and pain and fear. I knew it was too early. The baby would be too small. I could not seem to help; the pain came in sucking red tides, and I could have no ether because of the prematurity. I tried to push but my body seemed paralyzed; I tried to breathe shallowly and fast, as I was told by the sweating, distracted house physician and the tired nurses to do, but I could not seem to do that either. There seemed for an eternity only pain and pressure and more pain; nobody had ever told me that pain could be like this. This pain was past monstrousness and consumed the world.
Toward nightfall I thought my mother was in the room with me. I could see her plainly beside the bed, small and dark and lovely and smiling, her hands on my face, her voice soft with the honey and smoke of Charleston. I began to cry with sheer relief.
“Oh, Mama, I can’t do this,” I wept. “Tell them. I can’t make them listen to me, and Mama, I really can’t do this….”
“You can do it,” she said, but her voice was changing; it was not hers any longer.
“I can’t,” I wailed. “Not without Peter, I can’t. He’s left me by myself and I can’t do this without him. Oh, Mama, I hate him!”
The words rose up and up and became a scream, and the scream went on and on. Through it the woman leaned near me and brushed my wet hair off my forehead and held my hands hard, and I knew it was not my mother, after all, but my mother-in-law.
“You can do it,” she whispered to me. “You can and you must. You must forgive Peter and go on. At all costs we must keep things even, we women. This is up to us. And we will do this together.”
And we did. At four that morning my son Peter Williams Chambliss slid into the world, tiny and red and roaring with life, and the awful love that caught and whirled me away when they laid him on my stomach was as strong and old as the earth and would, I knew dimly, abide as long. Even as they lifted him out of my arms and I slid finally into sleep, I whispered, “Mine. Mine. Mine.”
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next morning was a nurse with an armful of silken anemones, as perfect and incredible as butterflies’ wings. She handed me the card.
From your lady of the secrets,
it read in a slanted black backhand.
To this very newest Peter. With all the love left. S.
I
t’s almost uncanny, isn’t it, the way our lives seem to run in parallel?” Amy Potter said to me on a June morning of my third summer in Retreat.
We were sitting on the beach below the Little House, watching the straggling remnants of one of the colony’s Saturday regattas toil out of sight around the point toward Little Deer Isle. They would circle Birch Island and come home again; this race would last all day. Peter had gone ahead early in the
Hannah;
we had watched him take her past the beach nearly on her lee rail. There was a streaming wind from the east that meant rain tomorrow or the next day. Parker Potter was only now struggling past in
Circe;
we could see the blaze of his red hair under the high sun. He was laboring with the mainsail, which was luffing badly. Amy sighed. It was not a good summer for Parker.
Petie lay beside me on a blanket, face reddened from the crying fit that had slid him, finally, into exhausted sleep. His small knotted fists still stirred restlessly, and a bubble formed between his red lips and burst. I adjusted the parasol that covered my small furious son and looked over at Amy.
“You mean because of the baby and being up here so close to your time?” I said. Amy was pregnant that summer, vastly and miserably. Her baby was due in late July, and Parker had promised to take her home to Boston in a couple of weeks.
Like mine, the summer before, her mother-in-law thought she should not be at Braebonnie at all and allowed her out of the cottage only for Saturday outings with me, and only after my promise that we would come straight to old Lottie Padgett’s tiny house on the shore. I knew that Helen Potter, like most other colony matrons, thought Lottie eccentric and unsanitary but a veritable good witch with children.
And it was true. If worst came to worst, Lottie Padgett could probably deliver babies as well as any midwife. So Amy and I came to her each Saturday morning, me with flailing little Petie, Amy with her troublesome burden. She had been sick most of her pregnancy and was still nauseated from time to time. Lottie Padgett fussed over us and fed us herbal tea and spice cookies and settled us in the sunshine on her beach, or by her fire if the weather was bad, and swept us into the untidy and beguiling circle of visiting animals and children as if we had been one of them. I felt tension run out of me like water here in this arcane doll’s house, and Amy seemed soothed and lightened, and even Petie stopped his crying and slept. This morning Lottie was off down the beach gathering mussels with the tow-haired children from Mary’s Garden and one or two Compound youngsters, and a nest of orphan red squirrels chirred in cotton wool beside her banked fire. I think I have seldom known such utter, seamless peace in Retreat as I did on those few June Saturdays at the Little House.
Amy pushed her hair off her face and grimaced as her baby kicked. It was a terror for kicking; I had
seen her stomach literally dancing with its force all summer.
I thought it must keep her awake, that and other things. Her dark, impish face was pale and thin that summer, so that the lone dimple beside her mouth seemed a hole poked in the flesh, and her eyes were deep-shadowed. And most startling of all, her dark bob was threaded all over with strands of silver. It had happened over the winter. They had not been there the summer before. I remembered she had told me that her mother was completely white-haired by the time she was thirty, so I was not altogether surprised. But the effect, on Amy, was not that of heredity but of illness and depletion.
She seemed exhausted that summer, and very frail.
“Well, the baby, yes,” she said. “And then Father Potter dying so suddenly, like Big Peter did. And Parker being…disturbed, and everything. I know Peter went through a pretty bad time after his father died.”
“It
is
uncanny, isn’t it?” I said. “Just be sure you don’t have your baby in the Castine hospital. Then I’ll be afraid that anything bad that ever happens to me will happen to you too.” I saw her tired eyes darken and added hastily, “Not that having Petie was a bad experience. But I’d rather have done it at home, with Peter there, and I know you would too. And you will.”
It was odd, that summer, that I, the younger and more in-experienced of us, in all ways the initiate, seemed older than she did. I thought again how very wide was the gulf between a woman who had borne a child and one who had not.
“I hope so,” she said, and her voice was thin and old. “I hate to say it, but I can’t seem to make Parker get serious about going home. Or much of anything else. Half the time I think he forgets that this is a baby in here. His baby, at that.
He told Gretchen Winslow the other day that if I got any fatter and sloppier he
was going to divorce me. With me and both the Valentine sisters standing right there.”
“Oh, God, I’ll bet Gretch the Wretch adored that,” I said, anger at Parker flashing hotly through me. It was not the first small cruelty I had seen him deal Amy that summer.
“Probably,” Amy said. “Especially since she’s lost another million pounds and gotten a gorgeous tan. Oh, Maude, tell me it’ll be better when the baby comes. It was for you all, wasn’t it? Didn’t it make Peter sort of…start to put his father’s death behind him? I don’t know what will happen if Parker doesn’t.”
I know what will happen, I thought grimly, but did not say. He’ll drink himself to death and you’ll be stuck with his mother and his grandmother and his baby for the rest of your natural life.
“It’ll be better, you’ll see,” I said, patting her hand. Its bones felt like a bird’s under mine, light and impossibly fragile. “Peter got himself together when Petie was born. He doesn’t go off on the boat for days; he’s not distant any more.
He stands up for me to his mother. He’s my old Peter; we’re closer than ever. And Parker will change too. Besides the change that comes with being a father, it’s sort of the other side of the coin of death. A birth so soon after a death makes everything seem…natural, a part of something much bigger and older. A cycle of the earth. It doesn’t take the grief away, but it takes the worst of the pain.”
“I wish I thought so….”
“I know so.”
Philip Potter had died on the Brookline Country Club golf course the previous April, of the secret red flower of an aneurysm that, the doctors said, had probably lain dormant there all his life and bloomed only at that moment. It had been lightning quick; he
had been dead by the time he hit the fairway. A mercy, everyone told Helen and Parker. He was simply not the sort of man who could have borne being ill or crippled. And that was true and, for Helen Potter, seemed to afford a great deal of comfort. As so many of the older women of Retreat did, she appeared to gain enormous strength, almost power, at the death of her husband. She who had never made a decision in her life, never even voiced a strong opinion, became overnight a woman capable of running a firm and selling the vast ancestral seat and finding a smaller and more modern home in Brookline and telling her mother-in-law, who had been wailing for forty-eight hours like a banshee, to shut up.
It was Mamadear who could not handle the death of Philip Potter. Mamadear and his only child, Parker. Parker got drunk the night his father died, and few people had seen him entirely sober since.
He had always been a hard drinker, and to an extent the colony was used to his escapades. But mostly they had had a kind of sophomoric exuberance about them, a bad boy’s panache. They were funnier, in the main, than they were destructive. It was widely considered that Parker was trying to get his red, roaring father’s attention, to be seen by him as an equal or at least a proper heir apparent: a cub trying his claws on an old lion.
But this summer there had been nothing amusing about Parker Potter’s behavior when he drank, which was virtually every day. He lost his fine athlete’s edge on the tennis court and at the helm of the
Circe,
and blundered and erred and stumbled and fell, and lost matches and races, and when he did he bellowed and cursed and threw his racquet and kicked the flanks of his boat and blamed everyone and everything but himself. He became so abusive on the tennis court that courteous Guildford Kennedy, who was his doubles partner, reprimanded him publicly, and Parker threw his racquet at Guildford and gashed his large, fine nose. He roared at a young native waiter in the dining hall when his coffee came to him cool, and dashed the liquid over the boy and told him to get out and not come back.
When Amy tried to reason with him, he told her to shut her damned flapping mouth and stalked out, overturning his chair and leaving her to struggle with tears as she made excuses for him. He ran Erica Conant’s chauffeur off the road into the village in his Mercedes roadster, severely shaking the furious Erica and her visiting bridge club from Beacon Hill.
And, Peter told me on coming in from the water one afternoon after a regatta, no one would sail with him any more.
His temper was simply too bad and his seamanship too erratic to be safe in deep-water races. I remembered the red-faced, savagely smiling young man who had faultlessly navigated miles of killer fog even when half drunk only two summers before and thought what a long, sad way Parker had come from that day.
“And he dumped God knows how much whiskey in the punch at the yacht club tea this afternoon, and you know there are always old ladies and children who drink that stuff,”
Peter said. “It wasn’t at all funny. Burdie Winslow is talking about suspending his club privileges, and Guild Kennedy has spoken to the tournament committee about barring him from court play for a while. I’ve never seen anybody behave this badly in the colony, and there’ve been some pretty high-spirited members before him. His father, for instance, raised more hell than anybody in living memory, but somehow he was never really offensive. It’s the liquor. He’s turned into a bad drunk this summer.”