She jumped up and blundered out of the room, leaving her plate and banging the door onto the sun porch.
“Daddy wouldn’t say rotten, stinking things like that to me,” she flung back over her shoulder. I could hear the tears thick in her throat. She would work herself into one of her shrill rages, and it might or might not have subsided by morning. Poor Happy. She was right about her father, though not in the way she wished. Peter would not have reproved her or sent her from the table. Indeed, he would have said nothing at all. That silence was the weight that had smothered the flame behind Happy’s smile years before.
“She is badly spoiled, I’m afraid,” Mother Hannah said with satisfaction to the table at large. “I’ve said so all along to Peter. This modern permissiveness will be the ruin of many a child. In my day such an outburst would not have been permitted.”
My cheeks burned with annoyance at her, enthroned in the armchair at the head of the table where she had sat ever since Big Peter died, even though for years it had been I who had served our meals and seen to the comfort of guests and done most of the cooking too. To get back and forth from the kitchen I practically had to climb over her, but I knew she would not think of relinquishing her throne to me. Once or twice during every meal I could see that she groped with her toe for the button on the floor that once had summoned servants from the kitchen, forgetting we had disconnected it when I had finally insisted that Tina Willis leave for her own home at midafternoon. Mother Hannah was very old now, and quite ill, and frail to the point of incapacity, and her short-term memory was close to nonexistent. But her autocratic will was unchanged.
“Where is Tina? I’ve been ringing for five minutes,” she would say.
“You remember, Mother Hannah. Tina doesn’t come in the evenings now. She hasn’t, for almost five years. The button doesn’t work. We disconnected it.”
“Nobody told me. Why wasn’t I consulted? Who took it upon themselves to tell her not to come?”
“I did, but only after you agreed that it was ridiculous for her to come when there were so few of us here. She’s entitled to some life of her own, you know.”
“Who’ll cook for Peter? And Petie?”
“Mother Hannah, I’ve been doing it for years. It’s only you and me and Happy most of the time now; you know Peter and Petie only come for a week or two in the summer.”
“No, I don’t know. Why don’t they come? Did you tell them not to? I want Tina back. Everybody else in Retreat has a cook in the evenings. How will it look, you doing our cooking?”
“Almost nobody has a full-time cook now,” I would repeat.
“The Winslows are the only ones; everybody else let most of their help go during the war.”
“You’re being very contrary, Maude,” she would say. “You know that is not true. Augusta Stallings has Marjorie, and Mary and Ridley Lincoln have Marva, and Helen Parker has Dorothy.”
And I would be silent, because Augusta Stallings and her Marjorie were both dead, as were Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln and their Marva, and Helen Parker was now nearly as old as the fearsome Mamadear had been when I first came to Retreat.
In the early days I
would point this out to Mother Hannah, but it had upset and angered her so I had stopped, and much of the time she lived among an army of genteel ghosts, attended by faithful phantoms.
On this night, I did not respond to her remark about Happy’s behavior. Instead, I looked across the table at Sarah Forbes, Petie’s visiting girlfriend, hunched down in her chair in embarrassment like a small brown wren fluffed against a gale. Petie had met her the year before at a dance at the club; her father was a visiting professor of economics at Boston University, and they were new to the city. He had been seeing her fairly steadily, and Peter and I liked her, though it was sometimes hard to remember her name. She seemed to me indistinguishable from many of the other young newcomers we had met in Boston or in New Hampshire since the war: bright, well-dressed, educated, polite, anonymous. There was no panache to Sarah, but there was no overt danger either; I thought on the main that she might not be a bad match for my stolid son. They seemed in many ways cut from the same good serge cloth.
But if Petie was serious about her, no one could tell; they acted together like comfortable childhood friends. I thought she was serious about him, though, very definitely; at times I saw in her round brown eyes something intense, something so hungry and devouring as to be almost alarming. I thought that little brown Sarah Forbes, under her chaste Miss Porter’s exterior, literally starved and burned for my son. It might have frightened me a bit, but it didn’t. I had seen that same desperate hunger in my son’s eyes, hunger for Elizabeth Potter, and it did not displease me that someone now hungered for him in his turn.
But I was fairly sure Petie did not see it, and even though he had brought her to Retreat for the first time to meet us all, I did not think she was yet, as the young say today, part of his agenda. I was faintly disappointed and said so to Peter, but he simply shrugged.
“Well, she’s certainly no threat to him. That’s one good thing. What’s that line from the Hippocratic oath? ‘First do no harm’?”
“You romantic devil, you,” I said. “Don’t you like her?”
“What’s not to like?”
It was Mother Hannah who did not like Sarah Forbes, and though she did not, of course, say so, her disapproval radiated out from her in small symmetrical waves and I knew Sarah felt in her presence the same outlander’s discomfort that I had known, when I first visited the old house on Charles Street. Sarah and her parents had moved to Boston from Michigan. From Grosse Pointe, to be exact, but still Michigan.
Sarah might be forgiven much, but not that.
“Forgive us this high domestic drama, Sarah,” I said. “Peter has often said that children should be put into cages at puberty and let out the day they leave for college, and he may have a point.”
“Please don’t apologize, Mrs. Chambliss,” she said with a shy smile that slid, even as she looked at me, over to Petie.
“My sister Charlotte didn’t eat an entire meal with us until she was nearly eighteen.”
I smiled at her, and Petie laughed aloud. She looked pleased at his laughter, and blushed, and I felt a surge of affection for her. My son would be safe with this small bird of a girl. He might not soar to dizzying heights in her company, but neither would he plunge into lightless depths. And he would laugh. I had come to know in Peter’s dark times what the lighthearted ones were worth, and at that moment, in the old twilight dining alcove of Retreat, I was ready to trade a good part of my life to Sarah Forbes in order that she become a part of my son’s. How many mothers, I have wondered since, have wanted just that for their children and labored with all their might to obtain it: safety. I have wondered, too, how many have come to find the victory hollow. There is no safety; of course there isn’t. But still, the specter of it powers the world.
Mother Hannah was displeased with the dinner hour in its entirety, I knew. Sarah Forbes annoyed her only slightly less than Happy in a tantrum. I knew also she was tired, and if I could not coax her to bed, her temper would rise until it spilled over onto one or more of us, probably Sarah. She tired very easily now; even though I brought her breakfast in bed and helped her down for a long nap after lunch, she still found it almost impossible to sit up with the family after dinner. But she sometimes insisted, loving, I knew, the quiet, dark hours with music and a book before the whispering birch fire, and so I did not push early bedtimes very hard.
But when she did not have them the rest of us usually paid.
The debilitating weakness, and the pain from the ulcer her old doctor in Boston had diagnosed two winters before, were constant and, I thought, severe. I could not know for sure because she refused to speak of her stomach trouble and would not let me take her into the new medical center in Castine on the mornings that she woke white-lipped and sapped from a pain-racked night. They were more frequent now, and more than once I said worriedly to Peter that I thought she might have something more serious wrong with her than a duodenal ulcer. The bland foods I cooked were no longer helping.
“He’s so old himself; can he possibly have misdiagnosed her?” I would say. “Or know something he should be telling us?”
“He’s a good doctor,” Peter would reply. “He’s been our family doctor all my life and a lot of hers. Let it go. Even if there’s something more, she’s where she wants to be: at home in her own house or in Retreat. Do you think she’d be better off if she couldn’t come to Retreat?”
And so I kept silent. But I worried, and when I could, I got her early to bed. This night was, I thought, one of the nights I would insist. I did not want Mother Hannah’s acid to spill over Sarah, and I did not think it would occur to Petie to stand up to his grandmother on her account, as his father had always done on mine. Petie dealt with Mother Hannah by simply tuning her out. I don’t think he heard three fourths of the things she said.
To my relief, she did not argue when I suggested an early bed.
“All this talk about omens and holes in dikes and Ouija boards; what nonsense,” she said in the breathless ghost of her old imperious voice. “I found a whole stack of Mary Roberts Rinehart novels that someone must have hidden all these years; I’ve never seen them. She’s far better company than gypsy fortunetellers.”
“She probably is at that,” I said, giving her my arm to pull herself up with. Over her head Petie grinned at me; he knew, as I did, that she had read and reread the Rinehart books in the long summers at Retreat, and he knew also that she sometimes still flicked at me with her oldest whip, that of my dark gypsy coloring. For I had, in all the years in the Northeast, lost none of the ripe, excessive bloom of the Low Country. “Madame Maude,” Peter and Petie both sometimes called me, and Peter once observed that his mother must be disappointed indeed that my time in this land of long nights and longer winters had not bleached some of it out of me.
Coming back into the living room after settling her in with her books, I stopped to look at my reflection in the wavery, underwater old mirror over the sideboard. In the dimness, it was indeed a gypsy who looked back at me, eyes black pools, hair still rioting around the dark face in dark laps and whorls, body still round and inelegantly lush, breasts and hips fuller now but waist still small. I smiled experimentally, and small pointed teeth flashed ferally. I picked up a crystal bowl from the sideboard and held it up before my face.
“Cross Madame Maude’s palm with silver and she’ll tell you a wonderful fortune,” I whispered, and then shook my head and went to join the children before the fire. Of course none of them had taken my talk of Miss Charity’s death and its portent seriously; who would have?
Micah would, I thought suddenly and clearly. Micah would know what I meant.
But I was not likely to have a chance to speak of it to him, not privately, at least. Since the night of the German spy—or, to be more accurate, the morning of that first and last kiss in the dawn kitchen of Liberty—Micah Willis and I had not been alone together for any length of time. By some tacit mutual consent, we had, in the intervening years, seen each other only in the presence of another person. He came just as frequently to attend to his customary chores around the cottage, and I ran into him just as frequently on my rounds on the cape or in the little Congregational church in whose quiet churchyard we had first spoken at length to each other.
But always, since that morning, Christina would be there, or Peter, or Mother Hannah, or one or another of the children.
It was not, I knew, constraint that kept us from being alone together, or any lingering pangs of guilt, or even any dark sense that to be together in privacy
would court more than a kiss, would lead to a dangerous and desperate passion. I was not sure what it was: a kind of comfortable accommodation to each other’s well-being, I think, and the well-being of others who were dear to us both.
I know that with both of us the kiss could easily have become something else, something deeper and fuller and infinitely real. I had, I think, always known that. But it was as if, given that knowledge, we were content to keep the friendship that preceded it intact, each of us knowing in his deepest heart that this lovely other thing hovered always just at our horizons, perhaps not ever to be tasted, certainly not to be hurried. Just there. It by no means changed the love I felt for Peter or, I knew, the quality of the affection and commitment he had to Christina. It was, for both of us, other and apart.
There are no limits to our capacity for love; that is the one sure thing I have kept out of a lifetime’s scant store of truths.
I first sensed it with Micah Willis.
He and Christina came often to Liberty in the evenings, after we had all had our dinners and the washing up was done. These evenings had begun that lonely, uneasy first summer of the war, and we had simply, in the manner of old friends, kept the habit going. We did now what we had done then: we listened to music and talked of anything in the world that intrigued and comforted us, we drank coffee and sometimes a little brandy and ate leftover pie, we laughed and told stories of our childhood and made fun of the people around us who, we felt, merited it. Just as old friends do everywhere.
Sometimes, when he was in Retreat, Peter joined us and enjoyed the evenings almost as much as I did. He had always been fond of Tina, saying she was a veritable mother lode of unmined gold, and Micah Willis had long had both his liking and his respect.
The children were fond of the Willises and saw
nothing unusual in the sight of the people who worked for their family in the daytime laughing and drinking brandy in their living room at night. But I have always suspected that the taunts of their colony peers and, less frequently, their peers’ parents sometimes found their mark. No one in the collective memory of Retreat, I’m sure, had ever had the hired hands in their homes as guests. I think Petie and Happy took not a little friendly fire over the situation from time to time, especially from Freddie and Julia Winslow, who took their cue from Gretchen. Whenever something snide about me and the Willises made its way back to my ears, it usually had its genesis with Gretchen Winslow. I cared very little about the talk, and in the main I don’t think Petie did either. He was already grown up and away from Retreat, essentially, now, a creature of a larger and newer world. But the talk could always wound Happy, sensitive as she was in her very soul to criticism, and I shielded her from the tongues of the assorted Winslows as best I could. In the long run, it did not matter. She heard far worse from Mother Hannah.