The house was empty when Sally and I got there. Sean was, I knew, down at the yacht club, where Caleb Willis was schooling the colony juniors in the new Beetle Cats. The club had bought a fleet of them from a broker in Boston, small, tippy little catboats to replace the aging and nearly unsalvage-able Brutal Beasts in which generations before had learned to
sail, and we had all cheered when Caleb came into sight around the dark bulk of Little Deer on a misted June morning the summer before, his father’s lobster boat towing a long line of Beetles down the bay. Peter and I had taken one, for Sean and Maude Caroline and whoever came along behind them, but Maude Caroline had my inherent loathing of im-balance and cast her lot with tennis and swimming. She was twelve this summer and had, for the past four years, gone to day camp over on Rosier Pond, at Camp Four Rivers. Many of Retreat’s youngsters did; the wallowing yellow camp bus called every morning at the top of the lane, and the chorus of “Yay, Camp,” rising from sturdy young throats in the still dawns was so frequent and loud that most of us had forgotten the camp’s true name and called it simply Yaycamp. I knew Maude Caroline was there today, probably knifing like a brown minnow through that blue lake water her great-grandfather had loved…and died in. Peter would be out on the
Hannah,
and as for Happy, I did not know where she was, only that she was gone. She took the car most mornings and drove away about ten, and returned at perhaps three or four, in time to supervise Sally’s bath and afternoon bread and butter and to have drinks on the porch with Peter and me.
If we asked where she had been she would say only, “Around. To a yard sale here and a bake sale there. I like to keep moving.”
And so we seldom asked any more. My dear Happy; she did, indeed, like to keep moving.
Sometimes, if we were going for drinks to one cottage or another, she would come with us, but not often. There were few households in Retreat where Happy had friends. I did not insist when she did not want to come with us on those evenings; Happy when she had had one or two drinks too many was as
formidable as she had been when she was a tantrumprone teenager. There was no telling what would come out of her mouth. I disliked those evenings, and Peter hated them; he would be cool and distant for days afterward, and Happy would be wretched. So she did not often come with us.
When she had not drunk a bit too much, she was good company that summer, for the most part. Peter’s delight in Sean spilled over her, and if she was jealous of the attention her father paid her son—as I knew she was—she wisely did not show that jealousy to Peter. Sean himself was offhandedly affectionate with her, as he was with everyone else except, I thought, his father. The few times I saw my grandson in the company of Tommy O’Ryan, there was an ostentatious boisterousness in Tommy’s manner, as if some savage com-petitiveness boiled just below the surface of his rough joie de vivre; I thought him just as jealous of his son as was Happy, but for different reasons, and felt contempt and uneasiness in the presence of that deep undercurrent. Except for his blazing strawberry-blond hair and the two deep vertical dimples in his cheeks, Sean was every inch a Chambliss, every inch his grandfather, both in looks and manner. He walked surefootedly and without thought where his father never could. I knew Tommy O’Ryan hated that, even as he beamed upon it and used it as his most effective wedge into the world of his wife’s birthright. That unspoken hate frightened me badly. It would, I thought, come home to haunt us one day.
For his part, Sean was quiet and closed and unreadable in his father’s presence, at least around Peter and me, and of their times together in the smallish house we had bought them in Saugus, where Tommy’s latest job had taken them, Happy would only say, “He and his father don’t really get along. Tommy needs a little girl to adore him like Seanie does Daddy. He’s after me all the time about that.”
And she would smile, a deep and secret smile.
Lord, Tommy O’Ryan. How that handsome mountebank has haunted us, even in his absence; I was right about that, the first day I set eyes on him. He was as much a presence, in his way, as Peter was, or Elizabeth Potter. No one in a group that included him could look away from him. Until the last day I ever saw him he remained one of the hand-somest men I have ever known. I have seen strangers, men and women alike, turn to look after him on the street, and at times when you saw him at close range, laughing his beautiful tenor laugh, say, with his white teeth flashing and his shining red head thrown back, or listening intently to you, with his blue eyes fastened full on you and that head cocked to one side, he simply took your breath. I could see, at those times, why Happy actually shivered sometimes with pure physical ecstasy in his presence; even when things were worst between them, there was that warm, invisible steam of flesh about the two of them together that spoke of night and bed, and even at my angriest with him I could understand why my child could not leave him. Had I not felt that way about Peter ever since the first night I met him? What, I thought often, would I have done if Peter had been a Tommy O’Ryan? I could not have walked away from him, any more than Happy could.
But he could not sustain any good feelings he generated.
Tommy O’Ryan had no boundaries and no sense of them in others; given any time at all in any group, he seemed devil-driven to exceed the bounds of taste and sensibility and often even common sense, and his appetite for what he called, often and loudly, the good life, was bottomless. He bragged and boasted and assumed airs when he visited us at Northpoint or
Retreat until Peter refused him both houses. He alienated the colony with his loudness and familiarity, outraged even Parker Potter with his drunkenness and language, and made flagrant passes at almost every woman under sixty in Retreat, with the exception of Gretchen Winslow, whom he called a frigid bitch—in her presence.
When he heard from an embarrassed Guild Kennedy that Tommy had cheated at poker during the hallowed Men’s Wednesday Night at the Yacht Club, Peter threatened to cut off Happy’s inheritance if he ever came back to Retreat. And so, except to deliver Happy and Sean to Liberty and fetch them, he did not. We saw little of him, I almost none. Peter, I knew, saw him periodically, since Tommy tossed away job after job, and another introduction would be required of Peter.
I believe he would have simply ceased to work at all, and lived off what he referred to as Happy’s birthright, if Peter had not tied Happy’s portion of Mother Hannah’s estate up into an unbreakable trust and arranged that only a middling income from it be sent her each month; he had done that upon meeting Tommy O’Ryan, long before Happy reached her twenty-first birthday. As for cash gifts to her, he simply would not make them. He would, he said grimly, continue to find jobs for Tommy O’Ryan as soon as he lost them, and was prepared to do so until hell froze over, and he would educate Sean and provide housing and an automobile, and medical care if it was required. But as long as Happy was married to Tommy O’Ryan, she would receive her inheritance in the form of gifts to fill particular needs. If that did not suit, she was free to divorce him. Otherwise, she would simply have to wait until Peter and I died to provide Tommy with the lifestyle to which he aspired, and even then there were ways to keep
much of her so-called birthright from falling into those strong, shapely Irish hands.
Happy stormed and sulked and raged, but Peter held firm.
And so, for several years, Tommy O’Ryan was with us largely in the hair and dimples of his son, the checks Peter sent for medical and dental bills, the inevitable calls from the latest of our old acquaintances who had employed him, and the shivering flesh and softly loosened mouth of his wife and our daughter. But with us he was.
“Is, was, and ever shall be,” Peter would say, closing the soft old leather check portfolio that had been his father’s after meeting still another demand from Sean or Happy’s doctor or dentist. “World without end, amen.”
“It could be worse,” I said once in the middle of this summer.
“How?”
I did not answer.
That was on a day in July, just after the Fourth of July regatta, the very same day Elizabeth Potter Villiers came pounding into the cottage sobbing that her father was trying to kill her mother with a poker, and please, Peter, please come quick. And once more, Peter took her hand and ran for Braebonnie, with me behind them, my heart frozen with dread that this time Parker might actually succeed.
When we reached Braebonnie we found Parker on the floor before the cold fireplace, vomiting, and Amy trying vainly to pick him up. The poker was still sheathed in its iron stand.
Peter gave Elizabeth a swift look of query but said nothing.
She flushed and turned away. Peter put his arms under Parker’s armpits and hauled him to his feet and marched him, stumbling, toward the downstairs bedroom. Even monstrously swollen from the poisonous fluids that had collected in his belly and extremities, Parker was so desiccated that Peter lifted him as lightly as a bag
of dry sticks. Amy pushed the white hair off her tearsplotched face and tried to smile at us.
“Sorry you had to get involved again,” she said, and her voice was remarkably steady, if deeply weary. “I told Elizabeth not to go running to you. It was only a stage two or three alarm this time. I don’t think he could have gotten the poker out of the stand, much less hit anybody with it.”
I hugged her briefly, and said, “No problem. That’s what we’re over there for.”
“Absolutely,” Peter said, returning.
“No,” Amy said, “it’s not. Nobody should have to do what we’ve called on you to do. It was a mistake to bring him, but the doctor said he probably wouldn’t have another summer.”
“I hope he doesn’t,” Elizabeth Villiers said in a low, cold voice. “I hope he doesn’t have another week. He’s not even a man now. As for a father, forget it. He was never that.”
“Lizzie—” Amy began, but Elizabeth burst into tears then, and turned into Peter’s arms. He held her gently and patted her on the back, looking helplessly at me over her shaking red head.
“I know it was silly of me to come running to you, Peter,”
she sobbed into his shoulder. “But he said he was going to kill Mother with the poker, and I knew that he would if he could…. I’m afraid of him. I don’t feel safe in the house with him.”
“Honey, Daddy’s way past hurting you,” Amy said softly, but Elizabeth just shook her head. How could she not feel safe with this poor scarecrow? I thought in brief annoyance.
She had apparently felt safe with some of the most dangerous men in Europe. But then I thought of what Miss Lottie had said—“Elizabeth will never feel safe”—and I thought that what Elizabeth said about safety had less to do with the physical threat Parker was to her than the primal bond of father to daughter that had never been there. She was right; Parker had never been a father to her.
As if picking up my thoughts, Amy said, “She’s never really known a father. He was past that when she was born. I think maybe that’s what she’s been looking for all these years….
I’m sorry she’s leaning so on Peter this summer; I think he’s become a kind of substitute for Parker. I’ll speak to her. It’s just too much a burden to impose on you two.”
“I’m sorry too,” Elizabeth said, raising her head and looking up at Peter and then over at me. In that moment her face was scoured of everything but loss and yearning and fear, and pity swept me. She looked like a frightened child. As, I thought, she was.
“No need to be,” Peter said, tweaking her nose. “I haven’t been able to play Galahad in a very long time. My two women are tough cookies.”
I looked at him, shaking my head in mock reproof. But I felt a small shock. Did he really think that of me? And as for his precarious, starving daughter, how could he?
“Let me give you a drink, then, as a peace offering,” Elizabeth said, but I declined.
“Sally will be waking up and Maude Caroline will be coming in from camp, and I don’t think Happy’s back,” I said. “Rain check?”
“I’ll have a quick one and see that your dad is settled down,” Peter said, and Amy and Elizabeth both smiled gratefully. I thought it had probably been a long time since either one had had a pleasant social drink with a man who was as whole and comfortable in his skin as Peter.
“Good idea,” I said, and kissed Amy and Elizabeth and went back to Liberty. Behind me, as I stepped over the stone wall, I heard Elizabeth’s restored laugh and Amy’s full rich one. Thank you, darling, I said to Peter in my head.
* * *
In mid-August I gave a cocktail party for Elizabeth Potter Villiers. It was what one did in Retreat, when a close friend had visiting family or friends, and besides, I knew Amy had longed to do it herself, to reintroduce Elizabeth to the colony, and had not dared, with Parker in the condition he was.
It was a large party. I even bit my tongue and asked the Winslows. Young Freddie had been an admirer of Elizabeth’s when they were both teenagers, I remembered, even when the wildfire between her and Petie was at its most desperate, and she had had other light friendships with colony youngsters her age. They would want to see her. So I simply asked everyone. Most came, whether out of curiosity about Elizabeth or loyalty to Amy, I did not know. I was simply glad, for Amy’s sake, that they did.
It was a pretty party, with late wildflowers and Japanese lanterns, and it spilled out over the lawn. The sunset over the bay that evening was a conflagration of blood-red and orange and deep, gold-edged purple, I remember: unforgettable. It was an autumn sunset, and everyone lingered out-doors until it faded, despite the gathering chill. I did not think we would have many more perfect days like this one had been. Even Micah Willis, who had come with Christina and Caleb and his Bucksport wife and their small toddling son Micah—the last and clearly most beloved fruit of that marriage, and a carbon of his grandfather—remarked on the dying of the sun.
“Haven’t seen a bonfire like that one in years,” he said.
“My dad used to say the devil was burning his trash when we got a sunset like that. The old-timers used to think that one of those red and purple doozies used to summon up the aurora borealis.