I am sorry for much that I put you through, but I had to
know that you would endure.
Take care of Peter. Keep this place safe for him, as well
as for you. He needs it like air and water but will not
always have the strength to stay and guard it. His father
did not, either. But neither can Peter leave it, just as, in
the end, his father could not.
I think the cottage must go from you to Sarah Forbes.
I see in her what I did in you when you were very young,
though I can’t say I like her very much. Petie can’t keep
it, and I doubt very much poor Happy can, either. So it
must be Sarah, or a woman like her. You will, won’t you,
see to it that Petie gets around to asking her? You can do
that. He will do anything you say.
Thank you for this afternoon and for many things,
Maude. Never forget that Gretchen Winslow is not your
friend, and I think it would not be a bad idea to kick her
in the behind every now and then, just on principle.
The letter was signed formally,
Hannah Stuart Chambliss,
and dated. I read the last sentence over again and began to laugh, and then I put my face into my hands and wept for my beloved enemy.
* * *
Very late that night, after Peter and Petie had come in, and the ambulance from the hospital in Castine had come for Mother Hannah, Amy and I walked down to the yacht club and sat on the porch. Peter had ridden with his mother, and Petie was on the telephone to Sarah.
We rocked silently in the moonlight for a while. Out on the silver-stippled bay the dark bulks of Spectacle and Osprey Head seemed limned in light, and, farther out, Western and Hog islands and Fiddlehead seemed to float on air instead of water. Stars blazed and swarmed. There was no wind, and no sound except the steady creaking of the old willow rockers.
Presently Amy reached over and took my hand.
“It’s us now, you know,” she said.
“Us what?” I said. I was tired to mindlessness, tired beyond surprise and curiosity. The warmth of her hand felt good, though.
“Us on the porch. Us with the right to the rocking chairs.
We don’t get up for old women any more. We’re the ones with porch privileges.”
“Oh, Amy,” I said, tears starting again as they had first that morning, when I had held another hand, a dead one, in mine.
“Oh, Amy. I never wanted to get there.”
T
his afternoon, from the porch of Liberty, I heard for the first time in many years the sharp, querulous whistle of an osprey. I heard it quite distinctly, despite the fact that my hearing has for some years been a source of annoyance to me and no doubt those around me. But this piercing cry was clear and close, though as I have said, sound is strange here by the water, and the fog that shrouds the colony this evening had begun to creep in by then, so I could not really tell where the cry came from. Not, I know, from Osprey Head. It has been a long, long time since the ospreys nested there. The eagles who came to take their place are wonderful birds, heart-stopping in their magnificence, and the colony at large is far more protective of them than they ever were of the ubiquitous ospreys, but I have always missed those first fierce and faithful settlers. They endured so much for the sake of their nests and nestlings; they never gave up and never left until it was simply no longer possible to stay. I have come to admire that fierce familial loyalty above everything else.
One could live a life for it, as the ospreys do.
The sound made me suddenly and savagely happy, the same dizzying rush of pure joy that I remember from my childhood. I can recall so clearly the last time I felt it: I was standing in a clearing beside Wappoo Creek on an afternoon in October, alone in the peculiar silence autumn brings to the Low Country, bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall. I don’t remember what I had been doing, only that I stood very still and closed my eyes. And suddenly such a smashing rush of joy and exaltation shook me that I could only hug myself and hold my breath against the onslaught of that pummeling happiness. Pinwheels of gold arced behind my closed lids, and then tears formed there, and slipped from beneath my lashes, and ran down my face. I don’t know what that moment meant, but I was somehow altered by it; after that I had a knowledge of perfect joy against which to measure experience. Nothing else has ever quite met it. Some moments have come close, but none had that quality of annihilation, of obliteration. I have always thought one’s knowledge of God should be like that moment, but unless that was mine and I misunderstood it, I have missed that transcendence. I never thought to feel it again, but I did, or something close to it this afternoon, when I heard the osprey call. It was gone in a breath, but I was left both shaken and soothed by it. A great, great gift for an old woman toward the end of her life.
The very old can tell you about peace. They have fought through the black, sinking, visceral knowledge of death—their own death—that heralds middle age and come to the place where childhood meets them once more, and with it that ineffable treasure that only the very young and old know: the tranquillity of the moment. The contentment of living each day
as it comes to them, wholly and with all senses. The young do it because they know nothing, yet, of pain and fear and the transience of their lives; the old because they know everything of those things and can bear them only by staying in the moment.
Carpe diem
may be the sum of all the world’s wisdom. I have always thought Horace must have been old when he wrote it.
So, yes, the old can tell you about peace, but rarely about pure joy, and it came to me like a benediction this afternoon on the wings of an osprey somewhere in the air above me. I think the sheer, shattering force of it owed all to the fact that it was my child who drove the ospreys from Retreat, all those summers ago.
After Mother Hannah died, the change I had felt in the air around Miss Charity Snow’s death was finally upon us. It’s funny that I never connected my heavy prescience, early that summer, to the death of someone in my family, but I didn’t.
Peter still seemed to me, after all the years of our marriage, the most alive human being I had ever known, and one does not think of one’s children in terms of hovering death. At least, I didn’t. And Mother Hannah had always seemed to me simply eternal, even in her illness and fragility. So it was only later that I could look back and see that the darkness that fell down over us that summer dated from the night of her death. In the midst of it, I could only flail at it in pain and impotence, wondering despairingly what had happened to us and why.
Peter moved through the hours after his mother’s death like an automaton, ashen and still-faced and closed. This time it was I who saw to the food and drink for those who came to pay their respects; the entire colony did, of course. I answered the door and the telephone, received the armfuls of cut flowers
and the notes and telegrams, patted the frail, spotted hands of the old ladies who had been Mother Hannah’s contempor-aries, smiled and thanked the younger women and men who had known her all their lives as the fixed star she had been in that small firmament. Christina Willis kept food coming, and Micah brought firewood and mowed and did marketing for me, and even Happy, sullen and clumping in her hated skirts and slippers, did front-door duty for an afternoon or two. Petie came from Boston and saw to the minutiae of death that can be so wearying and endless in a small, faraway place: the death certificate, the notices to the New England newspapers, the calls back and forth from the funeral home in Castine to Fitzgerald’s, the old firm in Boston that had handled Chambliss funerals since time out of mind, the services there, the interment.
Peter went sailing with Parker Potter.
When he came home, after almost two days, we fought about it.
“How could you?” I said, near tears from fatigue and my unexpected grief and a real and living anger at him. He was freshly tanned from the time on the water, and the golden stubble on his face and shadowed eyes seemed to me then merely the ensign of carelessness and indolence.
“It was easy,” he said tightly. “You just cast off, raise your mainsail, and away you go.”
“You know what I mean. When your father died you went sailing. When Petie was born you went sailing. When your mother died you went sailing. If you don’t care about us having to do everything for you, you might at least give some thought to your mother’s old friends. They loved her too, you know.”
“Too?” he said, his eyes suddenly fierce and stormy, like winter water. “What’s this too business, Maude? You know you never liked her.”
I gasped as if he had slapped me. It was worse than if he had. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I felt my mouth tremble with the hurt and its unfairness.
“I did better than that,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.
“I loved her, in ways I don’t think you ever knew about because you weren’t around. And I stayed with her. I took care of her. Maybe we weren’t best friends, she and I; maybe I wasn’t ever the daughter-in-law she wanted for you, but I was here. It was because of me that you got to go sailing whenever you felt like it.”
“Well, thank you, Saint Maude. It didn’t help much, did it? She still died,” he said, and this time there was no mistaking the pain in his face and voice. It was an older, deeper pain than I had seen there when his father died; that had been pure anguish, leaping like fire. This was dark, dull, endless. Peter would be changed by this. That twisted tie to his mother, which he eluded so long and so determinedly, had held after all; he had fled her all the summers of her life, but in the end she held him fast. My anger drained away.
Pain for his pain replaced it; that and a swift cold fear. What would we be now, Peter and I? Who would we be, without her in the world to define us?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here. I thought we might have a very small service in the morning at the chapel before we go back to Boston. I called the new preacher and he said he’d be glad to do a little memorial, and Petie will call around and tell people—”
“Whatever you like,” he said. “I’m going back tonight, though. I want to go home with her. I’ll stay at the University Club.”
“But…I thought we’d all go together tomorrow afternoon on the train. Fitzgerald’s will meet her and take care of her.
I’ve asked Mrs. Harris to open the
house and get things ready for a little reception after the service, and Petie’s gotten tickets for us—”
“I’d rather do this by myself, Maude,” he said, not looking at me. “Just a graveside service. I’ll call Dr. Constable tonight about that. Everybody will understand about not having people by after the service; I haven’t lived in Boston since I left college, and you never have, and most of her friends are dead. Hermie can do something later. It just seems better like this.”
I stared at him.
“Peter, she’s my mother-in-law. She’s Happy and Petie’s grandmother—”
“Petie can come with me,” he said dully. “He’ll have to get back to the bank anyway. It would be better if Happy stayed here with you. I don’t know if I’m up to Happy right now, and anyway I’ve got to get back to school. I’m going straight there from the service.”
“But everyone would understand if you took the rest of the summer,” I said, my heart pounding with dread, my mouth dry. “You know Charles can handle things just for a month or so. Peter, darling, take some time; you can’t pretend this never happened. At least give yourself time to heal a little.
You can sail, we can picnic, we can travel around some.”
“Now that she’s gone and you’re free?” he said, and smiled at me, a terrible smile. “I don’t think so, Maude. Thanks just the same.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” I whispered.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter said, and went out of the room and upstairs. When he came down, two hours later, he was shaved and dressed for the city, and he and Petie left shortly after that with Micah Willis, who was to drive them to the train station in Ellsworth, where the body of Mother Hannah had been put aboard a freight car.
He put his arm around me when he left, and gave my shoulders a gentle squeeze, but he did not kiss me. It was the first time in our life together that he had left me without doing so. I fought the pain and tears as hard as I could, so that neither he nor Petie nor Micah Willis would see them, and only when the car had jolted out of sight down the lane did I let the tears come. But it did not matter, because Happy saw them and came swooping in from the sun porch where she had been eavesdropping, dressed defiantly in her oldest tennis shoes and dirtiest jeans, face mottled with rage and what I realized only later was pain, primed for attack.
“You ran him off!” she howled. “You ran Daddy off and he said he was going to stay; he promised me he’d stay and we’d do things! We were going to go sailing and clamming, and he was maybe going to get us a boat, just for him and me because everybody knows you can’t sail…. Oh, I hate you and I hate that stupid old woman!”
I saw that she was quite literally blind with tears, choking on them, and reached for her, frightened and shocked. We were all used to Happy’s outbursts, but this was the fury and grief of a much younger child, the words of a preschooler. I had been annoyed with her much of the summer, but I had hurt for her pain and outrage, too, and felt keenly my own inability to soothe and feed her needs. Petie, too, had been a ravenous child, flailing at his own emptiness, but I had always been able to quiet and fill him. From almost the beginning, it was Peter’s arms and heart and only his that Happy wanted. And as with Petie, he had simply been unable to give them. I never understood why this man whose love, whose whole being, so filled and completed me could not seem to connect with his children. Perhaps, I thought now, seeking to pull my anguished child into my arms, that was why. The thought flooded me with fresh pain and guilt.