The Vagabonds (27 page)
Gravely she gazed at him. “Certainly, sir.”
“Peter. You must call me Peter.”
“Peter,” said the girl.
“That’s better, then.”
“Are you all right?”
“Not really, no.”
“The dining tent—it’s not so far. Or I could call for men to carry you . . .”
“No.”
“They have a stretcher, surely . . .”
He waved off the offer.
“We could return?”
“Not yet. Is there no . . .”
“‘
Fine and private place . . .
’”
“You mock me.”
“My grandmother’s farmhouse,” she said.
In this manner they proceeded and in this fashion acquaintance matured. Step by halting step and necessarily together they advanced through the dark wood. In time to come he would reflect that what gave him the advantage was the way he yielded it, and in the weighted scale of courtship he rose by falling down. By having demonstrated weakness and permitting her to take the lead he managed what mere braggadocio could not induce: ascendancy, as Peter Barclay came to see, was enabled by descent.
In the event, however, he was not conscious of seduction’s tactics; he concentrated only on the pain in his right ankle and the soft encumbrance of her narrow waist. She steadied him, then inquired, “Can you manage?”
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt you very much? Am I not being gentle?”
He shook his head, then nodded it. Now
she
was the leader and
he
her young charge, and she cajoled him sweetly, teasingly. “Not far,” said Elizabeth, “it isn’t far,” urging her wounded swain ahead as he himself had urged her on not fifteen minutes since.
She was, it must be repeated, untried; her youth was full of promise undelivered till this night. Had he persisted with glib reference to the primrose path of dalliance she might have grown offended or self-protective, self-aware. Yet as the man’s pain subsided so too did his pleasure increase. What first had been unfeigned alarm became feigned helplessness instead, and as she helped him forward he held back. By slow yet certain stages did they make their way together, and as though in preparation for what was soon to come their steps grew consonant; he remarked upon their matching names—
Barclay, Dancey, Dancey, Barclay
—while they approached the house.
A path, a meadow, a hillock and orchard: all these were an enchantment through which the couple moved. Familiar to the man but not the maid this coupled gait and linked approach; familiar to her but not to him the landscape they traversed. He knew as she did not the nature of the prize he sought; she knew as he did not the place where he might find it. And when at length a door appeared it must have seemed to Barclay that his fair guide had magicked it; he by himself would have remained till daylight in the ditch.
That fine and private place, the grave, requires of its occupant the same horizontal posture as the one ordained by bed; now as he stood and walked with her he quickened palpably, rising. A night owl hooted in the middle distance, and small creatures scurried away. She murmured encouragement as they went on, and yet he quizzed her carefully.
“This place belongs to?”
“My grandmother.”
“Your mother’s mother, so I understood. And she is?”
“At my parents’ house. . . .”
“For the evening only?”
“No.”
“But liable to soon return?”
Elizabeth made a confining gesture, dropping her hands while his own spirits lifted. “Grandma is an invalid.”
“How so?”
“She can no longer climb the stairs. My parents keep this place because she wants them to, and not because she uses it . . .”
“I might lie down.”
“Your ankle?”
“Hurts . . .”
“Poor Peter,” said the girl.
He would hold the memory dear. The hint of musk, the warmth of flesh, the susurrus of her rustling skirt remained with him through thin and thick and subsequent adventure. Although a magnate’s close companion and by custom used to luxury no meeting Peter Barclay planned would outstrip this extravagance; forgotten his indignity; annealed his ankle’s pain. She sat him down, undid his shoe, then pressed the blue vein by the bone.
The truth of his experience, in truth, was limited; those parlor maids and bar-girls who furnished Barclay his conquests had been indifferent or businesslike and reciprocating only as the bare stripped animal reciprocates when flat. Often, indeed, he had known himself used at least as much as user; often when offering dollars or drinks he had mused with postcoital sorrow on the lovelessness of what for lack of an alternative the world calls the act of love. That ultimate virginity of mind which masquerades as worldliness had been the rake’s lot heretofore, and though he might disguise to her the nature of his circumstance he was neither so foolish nor so much a knave as to keep it hidden from himself: he lost his heart to Miss Dancey the while she lost her maidenhead to him.
Little wonder, then, he wondered and would not share the scene. In the tapestry he wove of conquest this remained the shining thread; this was to be his talisman and golden amulet. Those suitors and antagonists, the French—so Firestone had taught him—call a wound a blessing, and as though blind Cupid’s arrow had been fired from its quiver with himself as purposed target Peter Barclay felt
blessé
and bore that wound for life. When he solaced himself thereafter with wife or lewd companion, it was indeed solace he sought. The constraint of his subsequent labors, his marriage, his duties in Brazil, Liberia, and elsewhere—all these enforced a distance, and he permitted enforcement. His masters sent him elsewhere, and Peter Barclay went.
But man can dream, can daydream or awake erect at slumber’s end, and for this particular fellow the vision of the girl beneath and beside and above him would not dim. If in later years his ankle twinged it made him more glad than aggrieved. Though he would go ten thousand miles and settle in a continent more dark than the farm’s darkness, Elizabeth Dancey remained his bright beacon, his Pharos and welcoming light. When old and nodding over wine he saw her move in the firelit glass; while on his deathbed babbling what he babbled of was her embrace, the dining tent and forest path and the verdant fields . . .
And she? She understood as he did not that what was past was history and not to be repeated; she knew on the instant, or so it would seem, that theirs was a prologue to nothing and drama with no second act. Of the swell who found her in the scented night, and took her hand, and took her arm, and limped with her in conspiratorial shared silence to the empty house, then struck a match and by its flickering uncertain flame discovered the door and the stairwell and bed—of him her seducer she sought nothing more and, were she to have met him in daylight, would have passed modestly by. No gossip she, nor self-propelling arriviste; her motive and comportment stayed as mysterious to her as him and in her lifetime equally not to be repeated. In subsequent behavior she would prove cautious, provident, but from that August dark till dawn she relinquished self-possession and was instead possessed.
In the throes of their shared frenzy is it possible a vision came of what their congress would produce and how their act would ramify, repeat? Did
she
put on such knowledge and come to see with clarity both sequence and its consequence, how cause becomes effect until effect in turn turns causal? Did he predict the motorcar would prove a lethal engine and those who followed after them would die while embracing within it? Or that the man who married her would collapse long decades thereafter in his great old age while standing in a parking mall and dreaming of Elizabeth herself no longer young?
Vagabondage is a tangled skein, and though Peter Barclay was practiced enough he had no skill sufficient to unweave what would ensue: the years in Liberia, exiled, the years she would return as wife to this very cottage and bed. The stay-at-home and wanderer are united too in this: her cries, her sighs are silence now; his animal exuberance has stilled.
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, then.”
“We break camp this afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“I
wish
it were not so,” he said. “I
do
wish we could stay.”
Where this preternatural knowingness had come from she herself could not construe, but she was both clear-eyed and calm. “Of course you do.”
“And I’ll come back.”
“Is that a promise?”
“A promise, yes.”
“Will you cross your heart?”
“And hope to die,” said Barclay.
“No! Don’t hope that; don’t make such a wish.” Passionate, the girl shivered.
“Well, I promise anyhow to try.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s good enough.”
“You’ll wait for me?”
“I’ll wait,” she said. “I promise.”
“Good.”
Then there was silence between them. She laid her hand upon his hand, her head upon his shoulder. In this attitude they waited for some moments. At length Miss Dancey roused herself. “Leave me.”
“Yes.”
She ventured it: “My dearest.”
“Yes.”
“You can find your way without my help this morning?”
He smiled.
“I need to clean up, rearrange myself. The bed”—becomingly, she colored—“its linens have been soiled.”
He frowned.
“I need to set the house to rights.”
“Your parents . . .”
“No. There’s nothing to tell them. Nothing to say.”
“In that case, my dearest . . .”
“Good-bye.”
2003
J
oanna and David return to Wellfleet after
West Side Story.
They have spent the day together, and she shows her brother through the house; she gives him the bedroom next to Leah’s and walks him through the guest wing—its heat turned off—where sometimes in the summer six people stay the night. “Not too shabby,” David says, and though he means this as a compliment the word stays with her:
shabby,
and she sees the Bay View Inn as a stranger might: ramshackle, ill-maintained. Harry and David meet briefly, and when she introduces them Joanna says, “Aren’t you two in some sort of business together—Harry and David? Mail order, right?” She laughs at this,
male order, right,
but the men are silent, shaking hands, and she tells herself not to be nervous and not to overdo it; their names may be Harry and David, but that doesn’t add up to a joke.
It’s Friday night, eleven o’clock, and the performance went well; Leah was just terrific, David says. Where did your daughter learn to dance, where did she get that
accent;
who was it, Chita Rivera or Rita Moreno who played the part on Broadway—she could give them a run for their money. That’s sweet of you—Joanna smiles—it’s very sweet but let’s not exaggerate, and did you notice in the program how she called herself Artemisia? I did, says David, what’s that about, and she says Independence, it’s called self-definition and how to horrify Mom.
The Cape has been buried in snow. For the whole time she’s been away it must have snowed, Joanna thinks; this is an old-fashioned no-nonsense February, the real thing. It looks the way Route 6 first looked when she visited in winter—when she and Mr. Ex-Right Ex-Husband #1 drove out for the weekend and fell in love with the quaint narrow streets and humped ice on the beaches and the dry-hauled fishing boats. In wintertime the sea remains, the sand remains, the pine trees and the sky remain, and the only thing that changes in the landscape is how scrub oak leaves turn brown. She and Mr. Ex-Right made the baby then who danced and sang so well tonight and they bought the house down by the harbor because it was available, the perfect place for vacations and maybe the whole year. It will be a good investment, her husband had assured her, and the worst they could do is break even and rent the place out in July . . .
Joanna understands, of course, that when you’re young and happy the world is young and happy too; the landscape is enchanting and a cranberry rake and rowboat are objects to acquire. For the first years she’d adored it here: the clambakes and cluster of freshwater ponds and square dances on the Town Dock. Those first summers they went sailing and gave cocktail parties; they met psychiatrists and actors and selectmen and were sociable all season long. She’d filled the rowboat with flowers and hung cranberry rakes on the porch. When Leah was born it seemed lovely and safe to spend the whole day at the beach—with a red umbrella and a cooler packed with sandwiches and plastic buckets and spades—building castles out of sand. When your love life is good and bank account full the world is your oyster and ready for swallowing whole . . .
And then one day you’re thirty and then thirty-five and forty-four, and Mr. Ex-Right Ex-Husband #1 is living in Chicago with a brand-new towheaded family while you’re spending your nights with a loser called Harry and wondering what
ever
seemed romantic in these snowdrifts, these empty and echoing streets. You have enough money to manage year-round but not enough to use the house only for the summertime; you rent rooms out to make ends meet and drive to Boston once a month and then maybe three times a year. It’s not so much Cape Cod that changed but her relation to it; now when she looks she sees trouble and loss, new roofs that mean the old ones leaked, new windows that signify dry rot and not a happy couple moving in.
David has been watching her. “How long have you lived here—fifteen years?”
She nods.
“So are you, aren’t you planning to . . .”
“To what?”
“To continue with the B&B?”
“Why not? It’s what I do.”
“Except you won’t have to,” he says.
And this is true, she understands, this is what they mean by Fortune’s Wheel. There’s that TV show,
Wheel of Fortune,
and the Ferris wheel she sat in at the county fair; things turn but stay the same. They strap you in and start the machine and sometimes you’re sitting on top of the world and sometimes at the bottom, but always the chair is the same one you’re riding; and what goes up comes down. “I’m rich,” Joanna tells the dashboard silently, “well, not rich
rich
but able to
deal . . .
”