Strawberries in the Sea (24 page)

By the time she was dried and dressed in pajamas and a winter bathrobe, the chill was off the house. She made a lunch of whatever she could find in the cupboard; cocoa, crackers, a potted meat spread, and canned fruit. After she ate she walked through the rooms. She stood for a long time in the big bedroom upstairs that had been hers and Con's. She remembered the unbelieving joy of those early nights in the marriage, and how she had been positive that nothing could be more perfect. She was still certain that there could never be anything else in her life even remotely like it. That was why so much more than a marriage was finished.

Gazing at the smoothly tucked coverlet handwoven by a great-great-grandmother and the winey dark polish of the pineapples on the posts, she was separated from the past by lack of sleep, the morning's hard work, the long trip on the boat, the bath, and food. She felt herself swaying where she stood. She went downstairs yawning, but the sight of the telephone reminded her of business.

She called Leona, who squawked with happy surprise and commanded her to come at once to supper.

“Thanks, but I've just eaten something and I'm going to bed,” Rosa said. “It's been a long day. Look, it's coming up next Monday. Are you still one of my witnesses?”

“Am I! I'd love to tell a whole courtroom what I think of
some people
.”

“Simmer down,” said Rosa. “It'll be in the judge's chambers.” Mr. Chatham had promised her that much privacy.

“Oh, I know I'll only be able to give yes-and-no answers,” Leona was saying, “but I'll do it with real conviction.”

“We have to see the lawyer Thursday at two. Can you do that? If you can't I'll ask him to change it.”

“I can if Scott's dental appointment goes through on time. In fact, I could leave him there. Yes, I can make it.” She sounded jubilant. “We'll expect you at supper tomorrow night. Had any corned hake lately?”

“Nope. I'll be there.”

She called Jude next and told him. “I'm sorry it'll mean taking time off from your work,” she said.

“I'm not,” Jude said. “We're just scared foolish you'll back out at the last minute, thinking he might come back if you held on long enough.”

“Thanks for your high opinion of my intelligence.”

“You mean you don't
want
him back?”

“I mean I don't expect him back.”

If Jude caught the difference, he let it pass. “Hold the line a minute, Lucy's wig-wagging.” She heard Lucy's clear high voice, and knew what Jude was going to repeat. “Lucy says you come and stay with us. She doesn't think you ought to be alone.”

Rosa laughed. “I'm not going to go to pieces down here and hang myself in the barn or something. I've got too much to do. Thank her for me and tell her I'm fine.” The prospect of being tiptoed around as if she were a deathbed made her itch.

“Oh, say.” Jude was carefully nonchalant. “Edwin won first prize at the museum. For the best portrait, that is. So you and he are kind of famous.”

Rosa whooped. “Hooray for Edwin! I ought to send him one of those horseshoes all made of carnations. And imagine
me
as a prize-winning subject.”

“You look good in it,” Jude reproved her.

“I can hardly wait to see it,” she said ironically.

The Pierces had collected her second-class and junk mail at the post office several times a week and left it in the back entry. There were two issues of
Down-East Fisherman
, and she took them to read in bed.

She was completely unprepared for the story about Con's new boat. It was like walking into the edge of an open door in the dark. The cruel surprise is everything for a few moments; the outraged astonishment at being tricked. Then she wondered how many people on Bennett's had read this article, but had never mentioned it to her. Jamie must have seen it; there'd been issues in a rack in the Sorensen house.

She read the article with reluctance, yet she couldn't ignore it. There was a good photograph of Con and the builder standing under the lovely sheer of the bow. Con was laughing like a boy. His hair was longer than it had been, maybe Phyllis wanted him to let it grow so she could curl it on her fingers as his aunt had done. He was wearing the Fair Isle sweater Rosa had given him last Christmas.

The author frequently mentioned Con's “infectious high spirits,” his buoyancy, and the way he behaved as if an aura of good fortune surrounded both him and his boat.

“Oh, it surrounds him all right,” Rosa muttered. “Thanks to various parties who shall be nameless.” There was no hint that he'd ever been married, in fact was still married at the time of writing; it was an account of his upward struggles, his progress from boat to boat until he'd finally attained this splendid craft which was almost ready to be launched.

“ ‘And she's not the end,' Conall Flemming assured me. ‘There'll be others. Oh, I'm in love with her all right, I've been in love since I saw her on the drawing board. I'm always in love with boats. I was crazy about my first peapod.' His contagious grin flashed anew, his blue eyes sparkled like the sea that is his life. ‘But I'm always looking for the next one. I'm a kind of Don Juan, I guess. Or maybe Casanova.' He laughed at himself, a truly happy man.”

“I wonder how many people threw up when they got to that part,” Rosa said aloud. She read the name of the writer again, to be sure it was a man. “If I was his wife I'd worry about him. He's more taken with Con than with the boat. All he left out was ‘roguishly tossing his red curls.' ”

The story finished with the line, “When asked for whom the boat was named he smiled mysteriously and shook his head.”

Rosa threw the paper across the room, but it fell apart and scattered en route. She was far from sleep now. She heard every car that passed and there seemed to be more than she'd ever remembered, even in midsummer. The telephone was also abnormally busy. After the silence of the island house her ears were too sensitive to the electric pump and the refrigerator's subdued mechanism. Finally she got up and wheeled the television into her room, and from bed she watched an old science-fiction movie that put her to sleep. She woke up later in the midst of a hospital drama, drunkenly turned it off, and fell back into sleep until morning.

She was rested, hungry, and the sun was shining. As if her mind had been busy organizing her while she slept, she awoke full of plans to make the time go rapidly until she could return to the island. She looked out of the window at the harbor beyond the wharf and fish-house, and remembered the days when she used to think she would die of homesickness if she ever left it. Now she was homesick for the sight of
Sea Star
in the small harbor of Bennett's Island; she wondered if Jamie were out to haul already or if they'd gotten herring last night and were sleeping late. What if
Centurion
came back? The seiner was a powerful obsession with Jamie. Obsessions could be dangerous. She knew.

“Snap out of it!” she said loudly. “Get to work!”

When she tidied her room, and picked up the scattered sections of
Fisherman
, she wouldn't look at Con's picture, but put the whole thing in the box of old newspapers in the back entry. Then she went up to the attic. She was not consciously considering selling the house, but if and when she did everything up here would have to be gone through, sorted, and disposed of.

She worked in this static and yet alive world of the past until the sun began to penetrate the screen of leaves and make itself felt under the roof. When she went downstairs, it was a return to the present and its unlovely sounds. Were there that many outboards in the harbor last summer? she wondered as one cut by the wharf with a piercing whine.

She looked over her clothes. Now she could get comfortably into those she had worn before this year's compulsive stuffing. She picked out a shirtwaist dress in a light, silky raspberry-colored chambray. Her legs looked good once more, and were tanned because of the cut-off dungarees she'd been wearing around the yard at the island, so she didn't need stockings if it was hot, and she remembered Jamie telling her she didn't need a girdle.

“My, what a romantic conversationalist you are, Mr. Sorensen,” she said aloud. “And pretty forward, if you ask me.”

Sandals, no make-up, a comb through her hair, and she was ready; she recalled with a painful pity the creature stuffed into tight clothes and torturing shoes and trying to make herself brave with inexpert make-up.

She was locking the pickup in the museum parking area when they opened at ten. Before the tourists began coming in to see the permanent Wyeth collection, the galleries echoed with a cool emptiness. The open show occupied the north gallery, and the girl with a guitar faced Rosa as she entered. She walked straight across the wide room to the painting. She had a weird sensation of meeting herself in a dream and of seeing a complete stranger there at the same time.

Edwin had done away with the rocking chair; the girl sat on the slanting bulkhead doors, her back to the clapboards, her head tilted back to rest against them; past the corner of the house the spruce woods were black against a faintly sunset-colored sky. Toward the viewer the hand and wrist were curled loosely around the neck of the guitar, yet conveyed tension in the fingers so Rosa could feel the strings pressing into her fingertips; profile and throat clearly outlined against the dark woods, eyes half-shut, lips parted. A big woman but not a stout one, absorbed in some half-painful, half-pleasant revery, singing to herself.

There was a card beside it identifying it as the first prizewinner in the portrait group. Another card titled it:
Strawberries in the Sea
. By Edwin Webster.

“I wonder what that means,” someone said beside her. It was a short woman with blue-gray hair, peering at the type over her glasses.

“I think it's the name of the song she's singing,” Rosa said.

“Oh.” The woman was frowning and discontented. “I think that picture of the children, with the apple trees, should have got it. It's a lot prettier, all that pink and white, and the blue sky and sunshine. But everything's hippies nowadays. Even in Maine.” She went away scowling. Her feet hurt, you could tell by her walk. Hello, you hippy, Rosa said to the painting.

More people were coming in now, and she left, feeling as if she'd gotten out of the frame and were walking invisibly away. It was being in a fairy tale, and presently she would meet a come-to-life scarecrow who would turn out to be a prince. Only for me it would be the other way around, she thought. I'd better not take any chances, or I'll end up with a bunch of old cornstalks dressed in overalls.

She drove to the supermarket at the north end of Limerock and bought enough food to take her through the time she'd be spending on the mainland. She still shrank from shopping at Seal Point; she couldn't forget all the times she'd gone into the store or post office when the rest of the people standing around had known about Con and Phyllis, and she hadn't. They must have started talking about it the instant the door closed behind her.

She drove back to Seal Point and spent the afternoon going through the contents of the fishhouse. She had supper at the Pierces', and went early to bed.

The next afternoon Mr. Chatham commented with pleased surprise on her appearance. “Almost anything would be an improvement over the last time,” she told him. He was young enough to blush slightly and stumble over his protests.

“No, but you look great! I mean, uh—well, that place must agree with you.”

“She's a darn sight handsomer than what he swapped her for,” said Leona. “You see her portrait in the museum?
His
son painted it.” She nodded at Jude, who smiled modestly.

“Really?
Your
son?—And you're the girl with the guitar?” he asked Rosa. “Of course! I can see it now! Tell me what the title means.”

“It's a song,” she said briefly. “That's all.”

“She made up the tune,” said Jude. “She makes up plenty of music.”

“I'm beginning to think this is a mighty talented family,” said the lawyer.

“Oh, they
are
,” Leona assured him. “And it's my opinion that Con Fleming just couldn't stand it—”

“Mr. Chatham's got something he wants to talk to us about,” Rosa said.

After he was through with the others she asked for a moment alone with him. “I'm not taking any money,” she said. “I wouldn't take any before and I don't want any now.”

“It's your right. I told you that before. You've helped him, set him up; this new boat is no small item.”

“He was my husband, and I did it because I wanted to. What happened then is over, so I want to cut everything off. I can support myself, and he'll have a family. The only thing is, I want the other boat,
Sea Star
, made over to me.”

Mr. Chatham seemed pleased by this evidence of self-interest. He made a note. “I'll call his lawyer right away.” He walked into the outer room with her, where Jude sat reading, Leona having gone to pick up her son.

The lawyer shook hands with them both. “Enjoy your weekend and don't worry about Monday,” he told Rosa.

“I have no intention of worrying,” she said with deceptive placidity. She was afraid of Monday, or rather afraid of herself on Monday, of what unexpected action she might take at the moment when the divorce was granted; it would be like hearing a death sentence, or seeing an execution when a shout of protest or despair is wrenched from the watcher in spite of all controls.

“Good girl, that's fine.” He was patting her on the shoulder. As young as herself, he managed to behave like a kind uncle. The other time must have been as rough on him as it was on her, and she almost told him so, but decided to leave the thing decently buried.

The instant they were outside the door Jude said, “Come on over and look at Edwin's picture.”