Even in my pain and the floating, buzzing beginning of the pneumonia that nearly took me away with it, I could see over his arm that the car was gone from Braebonnie and it was closed and shuttered. I turned my face into his chest. I was not surprised by that or anything else.
I was very ill in the hospital in Castine for two weeks after that. Grammaude stayed to nurse me, along with Beth Willis; I remember the first week only in vivid snatches, as you remember something from a fever dream. After clarity came back, I was simply too tired to talk, so I did not. There was nothing to say.
Grammaude seemed to know that. She sat beside me, reading aloud or just knitting and watching me, until someone made her go home, and then Beth Willis or a night nurse would take over. I said nothing to any of them. I think that Mike came, from MIT in Boston, but it might have been an image born of the fever; I did not speak to him either. He did not come back. I never asked if he had been real or a specter.
On a cold blue morning in the first week of October, Grammaude and Caleb and Beth Willis drove me to Bangor and put me and my luggage aboard a Delta jet. I would go straight to the infirmary at Saint Anne’s; my father was in Lima on business and could not be reached, and the matron Grammaude had spoken with had agreed to let me begin some tutored lessons from my bed. I was well enough to study a bit, but so weak I could not sit up for more than three or four hours at a time. I slept prodigiously, endlessly.
Grammaude worried about letting me go, but she thought it was more important that I not lose any more of my senior year.
I thought nothing was important. I would as soon be at Saint Anne’s as anywhere else, so long as I was not in Retreat.
As I turned to go aboard the jet at the Bangor airport, she hugged me hard, her tears warm on my cold face.
“Take care of yourself, my darling,” she whispered. “And forgive me for not doing better at it. We’ll make up for it next summer, I promise you.”
But I knew there would not be another summer, not in that beautiful killing place, not for me. And I thought that morning she knew it too.
In any event, it did not matter.
Y
ou should have told me he was here.” It was three weeks to the day from the Sunday I had arrived in Retreat in Mean Green’s old car. I was standing on the sun porch in a pool of butter-yellow July sun, looking across the stone wall to Braebonnie. A black foreign touring sedan with an international license plate stood in the driveway, and I had known when I saw it that morning that Warrie Villiers was back.
When I spoke of it to Grammaude, I saw by her face that she had known too. She freely admitted it. He had been in Retreat since the end of April, she said; Micah Willis had told her so. He was here when she arrived. He had been downstate in Portland and on down to Boston and New York since a day or so before I came; he had told her this himself.
Seeing to some business details, he had said. Warrie was back with apparently substantial financial resources, and he was in the process of buying property in Retreat.
He had already made several purchases, mainly from the old widows, Maude’s friends, the ones with porch privileges.
Many of them, frail, burdened with spiraling taxes and insurance costs, unable to find
full-time help to tend the big old cottages, their children un-interested in the colony, thought Warrie Potter Villiers was an answer to their prayers. In all instances he had assured them that they might stay on for their lifetimes. And if he resold the cottages at all, it would only be to buyers who loved the colony as it was. Their families and friends, in fact, would have first refusal. What, they said to one another, could it hurt? His prices were wonderful; he was, after all, a Potter; and he had said, over and over, that his only purpose in buying was to keep Retreat as unspoiled and protected as it had always been. All over Maine, the old colonies and cottages were being sold to encroaching tides of outlanders, new people who cared nothing for the quiet, spare old ways, who seemingly wanted to make of Maine and this wild cape new versions of Palm Beach, Southampton, Cape Cod. If Warrie Villiers could prevent that, he was indeed the Word made flesh.
“He’s quite the darling of the colony this summer,” Grammaude said. “Part of it, anyway. A great many of the older people remember him when he was a little boy, and that’s a very disarming thing up here. Family is everything. He’s probably going to own us all before he’s done.”
“I don’t care if he owns Retreat and Bangor to boot,” I said. “You should have told me.”
The old fear, that I had thought was beginning to be smothered under the weight of Retreat like a fire beneath damp leaves, leaped and licked once more.
“I know,” she said. “I really should have. But I was afraid you’d leave before you saw how little he can hurt you now.
There’s almost nothing there of…the young man you last saw. He’s quite fat, and he’s got a bald spot, and I think he’s drinking rather a lot. I hear he’s divorced from his second wife, the Italian one; a lot of his money is some sort of settlement
from her. The rest is an inheritance from his mother, I suppose. She died last year, in a nursing home in Nice. Hepatitis, we hear, but of course it could be anything. The point is, he just doesn’t have all that power any more. At least, not physically. And I wanted you to see he didn’t. If I’d told you when you first came, you’d have simply gotten in that car and driven away.”
I was silent.
“Are you going to be able to handle it?”
She stood beside me on the porch, her arm around my waist, but she did not look up at me, and her voice was small, nearly inaudible. I had not heard it so frail since the first days I was here.
“Grammaude,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve thought of him three times since the day I left here, until I got back. He’s history. He’ll stay history.”
She did look at me then. Her dark eyes were misted, far away.
“I was very wrong that summer,” she said. “I’d always felt bad about Warrie. He seemed such a lost little soul. To be her son was a terrible thing; you could see the damage in him even when he was very small. But I should have stopped it. I was wrong even to let it get started, much less go on.
You were just no match for him.”
“You could no more have stopped it than an avalanche,”
I said.
“Yes,” and she looked at me, fully back in the moment now, “I could have. I stopped his mother.”
“His mother? How?”
She looked back out over the stone wall and the foreign car, out at the glittering bay.
“Just a figure of speech. She was always trouble, Elizabeth was. I was finally able to convince her to…stand on her own feet.”
“She must have been very beautiful,” I said. “He said…that summer…that she had red hair like mine.”
Grammaude turned away.
“No, not like yours. Yours is like a living flame. Hers was…the red of old blood. Elizabeth was not on the side of life.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “I wish you’d told me. It would have been awful to just run into him.”
“I wouldn’t have let that happen,” Grammaude said. “I just wanted us to have a little fun together first. And we have, haven’t we, darling?”
We had. Despite the racking onslaught of the fear—or perhaps because of it—the three weeks had been oddly peaceful. Looking back I could see how hard Grammaude had worked to make them so; an enormous effort on her part had bought that sense of seamlessness and open-ended time.
I spent a good part of each day alone, roaming my old paths along the cliffs and in the woods, rowing my Uncle Petie’s dinghy in the cool early mornings, or just sitting on the rocks below Braebonnie staring out at the cloud shapes of Islesboro and Little Deer. But some part of almost every day was given to an expedition of Grammaude’s devising. Remembering her dislike of what she termed “running around” in the summers I had spent with her, and seeing now how diminished and fragile she was, I could only wonder what these past days had cost her. And yet, I knew that in some way they had nourished her as they had me. I could read that in her face, see it in her step.
It had been three weeks spent largely in the company of old women. I drove small shoals of them, every day: to lunches in little towns up and down the coast, where they knew of restaurants they wanted to try or had old favorites; to antique and junk shops as far as Bar Harbor; to have their hair done and keep their doctors’ appointments and have a Bloody Mary
and lunch afterward; to see the galleries and museums and sights that had been part and parcel of their lives in this place for half a century. I took them to the library to change their books, and to chamber concerts over in Blue Hill, and once Grammaude and old Mrs. Thorne from Mary’s Garden and near-blind old Mrs. Stallings, the last of the old ladies at the Compound, and I went over to Castine and had an afternoon of shopping and then dinner at the wonderful old Pentagoet Hotel, spending the night there and coming home the next morning singing like children from Yaycamp as we soared up and over Caterpillar Hill: “I been working on the railroad, all the livelong day….”
But at the top of Caterpillar Hill, Grammaude turned her face away and closed her eyes, and I could have kicked myself for choosing that way, remembering only then that it was just here, out into all that amplitude of space and wind and water, that my grandfather had soared in his little green sports car.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her, and squeezed her hand on the seat beside me. It was as cold as ice, as death, the claw of a dead bird.
“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s a beautiful spot. One you would choose, if you had to choose.”
In the evenings I took Grammaude to other cottages for drinks, or we had a few people to Liberty. Most were old.
Several times old Micah Willis came and sat before a fire in the living room and had coffee and brandy with Grammaude, and I would hear them laughing together from upstairs where I lay reading old Mary Roberts Rinehart novels, hear their voices rising and falling like frail birdsong, hear the comfortable cadence of more than half a century’s affection, like an old phonograph record long since worn into a groove. I heard the chink of china as Grammaude
poured more coffee, and the ring of crystal from the old decanter where she kept the brandy, and sometimes little spills of music from the phonograph or the radio, but usually only the talk. They asked me to sit with them, and I might have, for I was fond of Micah Willis, but somehow the most comforting thing for me in those long nights, when the fear still nibbled and raked at me sporadically, was simply to lie under piled quilts in the circle of light from the reading lamp and listen to those two voices rising and falling in concert, like the twin threads of a sonata. They were anchors, those voices, anchors to my childhood summers here, anchors to the very earth. I slept deeply on the nights I slid into sleep listening to them.
More than once in those weeks I thought ruefully that I was doing what young women had done in Retreat since time out of mind: tending the old. But instead of finding them oppressive, I felt this time that the company of old women was soothing. They did not fuss and twitter nearly so much as I remembered, or at least the ones Grammaude spent time with did not. And they were not autocratic. They were funny, these old women; they may have talked constantly of the past, but it was a past full of particular and often eccentric people doing things that charmed and amused me. I remarked on it once to Grammaude.
“When you’re old,” she said, “you have a lot to pick and choose from in your memory. If you’ve lived an interesting life, the things you’ll want to keep will be rather wonderful.
I think only bores talk about boring things. There are some awful bores in Retreat, but I’ve never hung around with them if I could help it. I heard too many dishwater-dull stories from old people when I was your age. I vowed I’d have good things to remember and talk about.”
“Well, you have,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “And when you’ve been here a little longer I’ll tell you some even better ones.”
“Like?”
“Like ‘What I Did for Love.’ You remember that song?
You liked it, the last year you were here.” She stopped. “I’m sorry, Darcy. I keep forgetting it was such a bad year for you.
This one has been such a good one; for me, anyway.”
“For me too, Grammaude.”
“We haven’t driven you to distraction, we old ladies?”
“No. I forget the difference in our ages, I really do. Sometimes we all might be teenagers together. And my car hasn’t shocked a single soul. I’m terribly disappointed.”
She laughed. “After what we’ve all lived through, a little shit happening isn’t going to matter one way or another. I’m glad you’ve gotten to know them a bit, darling. I think it’s maybe your time to get to know the old. You couldn’t have, before, but you’ve been through enough now so that you can begin to understand the…the impulse toward simplicity that a lot of people think is senility.”
She was right. In those three weeks, with the old ladies of Retreat, I had tapped into an odd richness; they were, literally, the past, the provenance I had always felt denied me.
Retreat’s timelessness had begun to work its old magic. The moment, the moment was all and would sustain me. The moment had been, would always be.
And now, into it, Warrie Villiers had come. I leaned against the old rattan writing table that had been my great-grandmother Hannah’s and looked at Braebonnie, lying quiet and shuttered in the bright morning. Upstairs. He would be upstairs, perhaps still sleeping, perhaps just waking…. I felt heat start in my chest
and climb my neck to my face. Did he still sleep in the little white iron bed that had been his mother’s?
That had been ours?
I held myself very still and closed my eyes and looked as deeply inside myself as I could, to see what I was feeling. I had not done that since before the hospital in Atlanta; to do it after the onset of the fear would be to open myself to dev-astation. I was a past master at closing off those deep places where old feelings lay. But I did it now. I needed to know if, after all, I must get into Mean’s old car once more and run away. I did not know where I would run to; Retreat was my last refuge. Back against the wall, I held my breath and looked.