Across Cam’s blazing red head we looked at each other, my father and I.
Is this all right with you?
my eyes said to him.
Yes. This is the way it will be,
his said back to me. The first lie we had ever conspired in hung heavy and odorous between us. And then it simply floated away on the light September wind on our terrace, and forever after, or almost, that was what had happened to my Beetle Cat.
“Did you get another one?” Cam asked, expectation lighting his already luminous face.
“Well, we haven’t been back in a long time.”
“It was so much her mother’s place,” my father said, “somehow we just haven’t wanted to go back.”
A wild, honey-sweet joy filled me. I could do this for Cam. I could give him Edgewater.
“Daddy,” I said, my voice trembling with the effort to make myself believed, “I want to go back. I want to go back now, before school starts. We have time. We could open it up easily. I—I miss it, Daddy. I want Cam to see it. Please, couldn’t we just go? Tatty could come with us.”
I stopped and watched his face. It was still. We did not speak for a long moment. I realized that I was holding my breath.
Slowly, he nodded. He was still not looking at me, but over my head and back up at our house.
“I suppose we could,” he said. “I guess it’s time.”
I ran to him and threw my arms around him, hugging as hard as I could. It struck me that it was a child’s gesture, and I let go. But he hugged me back, as I could not remember his having done since, perhaps, I was very small.
“Thank you,” I whispered, tears stinging my eyes.
“If we left tomorrow,” Cam said tentatively, “we could have a good long time there before Lilly starts school. Maybe over a week. Would that be possible?”
“I don’t see why not,” my father said finally. “We don’t need to pack much. I think we still have summer things up there. Maybe just a jacket and sweaters. It’s not very nippy yet. I could call Seth and he and Clara could open the place and get us in a few groceries. Lilly, could you be ready by then?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Oh, yes I could.”
“Tatty?”
“Do you really want me to tag along?” Her face was shining, too.
“Yes,” my father and I said together.
“Then I better go home now and see what I’ve got that’s Maine-worthy.”
“It’s not the North Pole, you know.” My father smiled at her. “Or the wilderness. You won’t need heavy boots and a machete. We don’t wear much of anything but pants and shirts and sweaters. Bring sneakers if you’ve got them. I don’t want a mahogany deck I’ve spent half a lifetime polishing scratched.”
I could tell that he was excited also—just a bit, but excited.
It was an enormous step we were taking, but I believed then that he and I were the only ones who knew that.
Cam kissed my cheek and pounded my father on the back and hugged Aunt Tatty briefly.
“Got to get back to the river,” he said. “Stuff to go over with my foreman. And I want to get some stuff together.”
“You really won’t need much,” I said.
“I’ll only bring what I need.”
W
e got to Edgewater after dark, just as the huge blind eye of the Harvest Moon slid from behind Mr. Carl Forshee’s towering promontory and flooded the bay and surrounding islands with molten silver, as far out as Great Owls Head Island. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and turned the world on; far to the right the spires of the Deer Island Bridge stood out like a child’s Erector set. The roofs of all the summer cottages in Carter’s Cove were etched starkly against the moon and sky. There were no lights in any of them except one, a little way down from ours, and seeing the porch light on at Edgewater was like falling, falling precipitously into a well-remembered and well-loved dream. It had been so long since I had seen the house like this, yet it might have been only last night. I almost expected to see the darting shapes of children playing Kick the Can on our moon-flooded lawn, hear their cries and laughter, my own among them.
“Well,” my father said. He was the first to speak.
“Here we are. I see Seth has turned on the porch light, and the lawn’s been mowed.”
“And somebody put the flag up,” I said faintly, watching it whip against the sky as it had on so very many nights, so long ago.
“It looks as if somebody’s here besides us,” Aunt Tatty said, not getting out of the car. None of us seemed quite able to leave it yet. It was too sharp a transition.
“It’s the Davenports’ house,” my father said. “I didn’t know they still came up; Mrs. Davenport is almost totally crippled with arthritis. It’s pretty late for them to be here, but I don’t think he takes services anywhere anymore, so there’s really no need for them to go back. They must have somebody to help them, though.”
He stopped. So did my breath. “Peaches” hung heavy and throbbing, an infection in the air between us.
“I don’t think it’s the granddaughter,” Aunt Tatty said. “I heard at the club that she’d already gone off to Randolph-Macon. I think they have a young man who lives in.”
I breathed again, and turned to Cam. He was staring at the house and bay as if he’d never seen a house beside water before.
“So what do you think?” I asked, suddenly anxious. I had never seen it, but McCall’s Point was purported to be one of the truly grand plantations on the James River. This old house surely paled beside it.
“I think,” he said in a near whisper, “that I’ve died and gone to heaven. I’ve only been to Kennebunkport a few times when I was a kid, when Dad and Mother visited somebody or other on the point there. And Camden once. Both of them were wall-to-wall traffic and tourists milling in the street like sheep. I realize now that I’ve never really been to Maine.”
I saw the corners of my father’s mouth curl up in the dark, and knew that it had been absolutely the right thing to say. I felt my heart squeeze with love for Cam. I felt that at least there was something I could give him that he didn’t have.
As if at a signal we all opened our doors and got out of the car. The wind off the bay was still soft and freighted with pine and fir and salt, and kelp, but the tops of the trees sang with a note I had never heard before. It was a winter song. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” it crooned, far up in the treetops.
I shivered.
“You cold?” Cam asked, putting his arm around me. It was warm and strong, and I leaned into it.
“Not really,” I said. “It’s just different in fall somehow. I guess it’s because most of the houses are empty.”
We walked across the grass to the steps. There had never been an outside light here, but no one had ever needed one. Our feet could find their way in the dark, and had, many times. Even now, as if of their own volition, mine sidestepped the hollows where the rain always pooled, and the holes made by the skunks foraging for grubs, and the formidable rocks, children of the great glacial boulders, that no one had ever thought of digging out. Behind me, Cam was surefooted, but Aunt Tatty stumbled once or twice, and I remember with annoyance and amusement that she wore high-heeled sandals.
“You’re going to break your neck in those,” my father had said when we picked her up.
“I have tennis shoes in my bag,” she said. “I’m just going to be in the house when we get there.”
“You’ve got to
get
to the house,” he said shortly, but did not pursue it. Now he took her arm and walked her firmly to the steps, and we went up and across the big porch and my father pushed the door open. It was unlocked; Seth or Clara again, I thought.
My breath caught at the familiar smell of perpetually salt-damp rugs and upholstered furniture. Sour, years-old dust from mold and old books and the ghosts of fireplace embers and, somehow, Wilma. And perfume. In the thick air of the recently opened house, a note of the fresh, bitter-green scent my mother always wore. When my father lit the big lamp on the table by the old tartan sofa and the room bloomed into dim sixty-watt light, I looked at him. Did he smell it, too? It was as if she had just walked out of the room. But he gave no sign that he did. He continued around the living room turning on lamps, and we stood for a moment in a small knot, Cam and Aunt Tatty and I, inhaling summers out of mind and the skin of people long gone from us.
The room was immaculate; floors were polished and the fireplace cleaned and stacked with new apple-wood logs, and the smell of furniture polish and Clara’s Murphy Oil Soap and a warm, buttery smell from the kitchen washed over me like a tide. I closed my eyes and stretched. It was as if the very air welcomed and embraced me. I was where I was wanted and loved; there was no other place I should be but here.
“It’s a lot bigger than I remember,” Aunt Tatty said, peering around in the dimness. I wondered how the house looked to her, how it would look to a stranger seeing it for the first time. I could not imagine that. No matter what anyone did to it in the years to come, I knew I would always see it through the eyes of the child I had been. Tatty vanished into the dark kitchen, and I saw the light flick on. My father was contemplating our small pile of luggage, and Cam was simply standing, hands in pockets, rocking slightly and looking around. The faint smile on his face was, I knew, unconscious.
“There’s some kind of chowder,” Aunt Tatty said, coming back from the kitchen, “and a pie. Looks like blueberry. And a plate of muffins.”
“Clara.” My father smiled. “It’s what we’ve always had the night we got here.”
“Well, let’s get our bags put away and I’ll heat it all up,” Tatty said. “Maybe we could have it on trays in front of the fire. George, where do you want me?”
I saw bewilderment on my father’s face, and knew he had not considered this. Where would we all sleep indeed?
I started to speak up, to say that I wanted my old room back. But he spoke before I could.
“Tatty, you take Jeebs’s room, at the back corner of the second floor,” he said. “It has the best view of the water, and the bathroom is right next door. Cam, I think the real guest room would be good for you—it has the best mattress and the newest bedcovers, and there’s a dumbwaiter in the closet that goes down to the kitchen. Never can tell what you might pull up. Front room right, other end of the hall. Lilly”—and he looked at me—“I want you to take your mother’s room.”
“Daddy, no—that’s yours, too,” I protested. I did not want my mother’s spare, soft-lit room. I wanted my own, with the chipped iron bedstead and the spavined mattress Wilma and I had curled up on so many nights, and the pentimento of each passing year pasted over the one before it: posters, a dreadful painting of the house leaning lopsidedly over the bay that an aunt had painted, a small watercolor of the dock and the Beetle Cat and the Friendship my mother had done over my spindly desk, and sagging shelves full of crumbling paperbacks, dried and lusterless shells arrayed on the bureau and the mantel.
“I can’t sleep there,” my father said matter-of-factly. “All her clothes are still there. I’ll take your room. I always liked it.”
“We’ll get Elizabeth’s things packed up and labeled in no time,” Aunt Tatty said. No one spoke. I thought that I would throttle her if I saw her with a pile of my mother’s clothes over her arm.
“I’ll take the bags up,” Cam said into the silence. He picked them up, two in each hand, and swung them up the dark stairs as easily as he might have lifted grocery bags. I doubted they were heavy. His, in fact, looked to be the largest.
When he came back downstairs there were noises and wonderful, familiar smells from the kitchen, and my father was bringing in our old rattan trays, trailing curls of rotting wicker and laden with steaming blue pottery bowls, into the living room. I had touched a match to the apple logs, and the sweet smells of summer smoke curled into the room. I sat down in a corner of the old sofa and closed my eyes and let the house breathe into me. I remembered then that I had not run out to look at the bay, to listen to its breathing and feel my own synchronize with it. Somehow the breath of the house in my lungs was gift enough for now.
When we had finished eating, Cam carried our dishes into the kitchen and washed them before anyone could protest, and came back into the living room, smiling.
“It’s like the best summer camp in the world,” he said. “My mother would have her interior designer out here by dawn tomorrow.”
“Well, it’s not much—” I started to mumble, but he cut me off.
“It’s everything. I think I’d shoot the first designer who put a foot in here. I know more about your family by just being in this house for an hour than I could find out in a month. It’s a family to dream about.”
Little do you know,
I thought, but then I knew he was right. Ours had been, up until our last day here, close to just such a family. I could not have seen that then, but I did now. My heart flopped, fishlike, with loss and remembrance.
“What’s on the third floor?” Cam asked.
“Attics. Storage rooms. Bedrooms for the servants we never had,” I said. “And my favorite place on earth. My own special place. No one came in unless I invited them.”
“Can I see?”
“Well, since it’s you,” I said, smiling at him.
We started up the dark, precipitous stairs that miraculously had never caused a major fall. I looked back into the living room. Aunt Tatty was smiling up at us. My father was not smiling, but on his face was written loss, and wistfulness, and a kind of acceptance that smote me through
. He’s lost too much,
I thought.
How can I go away from him?
But I knew I would.
In the far corner of the attic, my retreat was still as I had left it, so far as I could see. The small, tattered rug was disheveled, from being wrapped around me that last night, and the old, faded quilt still lay in a pile next to it. When I switched on the dim old brass floor lamp I had confiscated for my hideaway, I saw that books were still spilled across the floor where I had jerked them from the shelves in the agony of that night. I had not let myself remember it until now. It flooded me, almost doubling me over, and then seemed simply to wash away on a wave of warmth. I smiled, standing in the beneficence as I might under a warm shower. Whatever was in this house, it wanted my well-being.