But I never once wished we had stayed.
I was drifting, only half aware, when a muffled boom cut the thickness and a shower of colored lights arced and sizzled into the water close by. I jerked my head up and my arms, finally, gave way. The pole clattered onto the deck and slid into the water.
“What is it?” I tried to say. My voice could not get out of my raw throat.
“Fireworks from somewhere,” he said casually, as if we were strolling in a park.
His voice was as clear and strong as when I had first heard it. There was no trace of whiskey slur. Hours in the cold salt air had taken care of that.
“What does it mean?”
“It means we’re coming into somebody’s harbor where they’re waiting for us. I’d say it had to be ours.”
I dropped my head into my arms on the deck and began to cry.
We heard voices then, the sound of men shouting and one or two women. There was urgency and even fear in them. I heard Peter’s over the others: “Maude! Maude!”
Parker cupped his hands and shouted, “Out here! Coming in about ten yards off Cove Harbor Rock! We’re okay, but hope you have blankets.”
“Oh, Maude, thank God!” I heard Peter say, and all of a sudden we bumped hard into the dock and were home. As running feet began to pound down the catwalk Parker said, “You going to tell on me, Maude?”
I knew in that moment, clearly and roundly as an egg, that if I should do so, there would be those in this place who never would believe me, and others who would always wonder. I realized that I was not absolutely sure about Peter.
“No,” I said. “But if you ever do it again I will.”
“Your virtue is safe with me,” he drawled. “It ain’t worth the fuss.”
When Peter’s arms lifted me off the deck of the
Circe,
I was weeping with rage as well as with relief and deliverance.
When Peter had me fast in his arms, wrapped in a blanket, hurrying me, stumbling, up toward the cottage, Amy Parker came over to me and put her arms around me.
“I’m so sorry your first time out was like that,” she said. “I know Parker’s a great sailor and you were safe as a house, but it must have scared you to death.”
“Yes,” I said, my teeth chattering hard. “It did.”
“I know,” she said. “I hate it too. I absolutely will not go out again with Parker, and I’ll bet you won’t either. When you’ve rested I’ll come over one afternoon and we’ll go sketching down on the rocks. I do it often. If you’d like to, of course. Maybe you don’t want to get that close to the water again.”
I smiled fully and openheartedly at her. She was, with her artless chatter, absolving me of any complicity in the awful afternoon, and she was doing it in front of half of the colony.
“I’d love that,” I said.
Peter was coldly and whitely furious, but it was with Parker, not me.
“Why in the name of God did you take her out?”
he shouted at his friend. “You knew there was fog coming in. It’s why we didn’t go; you said yourself you didn’t want to get
Circe
out in that.”
Parker, muffled to the eyebrows in Hudson Bay wool, looked at Peter in silence for a moment and then dropped his eyes. The effect was one of gallantry and forbearance.
“I know, I shouldn’t have,” he said. “But she wanted to go…. I could never stand a lady begging.”
I took a deep breath and then exhaled. Let it go. As soon as I could be warm and in Peter’s arms, nothing would matter. I was not, after all, worth a broken friendship.
But I knew that I would never be a friend to Parker Potter, nor he to me.
Mother Hannah was furious too, though she tried not to appear so, and there was no doubt that it was at me.
“It was extremely poor judgment,” she said, as I lay wrapped in blankets before the fire in Liberty, shaking uncontrollably, sipping hot tea with brandy, with Peter rubbing my white chilled feet.
“I blame Parker, of course; he of all people should know better than to take you out alone, both because of the fog and the appearance of it. I shall tell Helen so, too. But Maude, I simply cannot believe you went aboard that boat without another woman present, or an older man—”
“I thought we’d just be an hour or less,” I murmured. “He said he’d take me around to the boathouse where Peter was, and I thought it would be a surprise.”
“Well, I’m sure it was that,” she snapped. “We had the whole colony out. Big Peter called the Coast Guard; he had to call back and tell them it was a false alarm. Dr. Lincoln waited for four hours on that freezing dock in case you were injured, and him nearly
seventy. Peter was beside himself. And his father and I—”
“Let up, Ma,” Peter said, and his voice was cool and level.
“Maude didn’t know there was fog out there. That sail takes about half an hour, normally. Parker’s the one who knew.”
“Parker is too much a gentleman to refuse a lady when she…begs,” my mother-in-law said. It had not, I thought miserably, taken Parker’s lie long to fly up the lane from the dock.
“I doubt she begged,” Peter’s father said mildly from the couch.
“I didn’t,” I tried to say, but my sore throat closed around the words, and I felt weak tears threatening to spill. I was silent.
“Well, we’ll say no more about it,” Mother Hannah said.
“Peter, you’d better get Maude upstairs and into a hot tub.
I’ll bring up a hot water bottle. Go straight to bed, Maude.
I’m sorry you were frightened. I know you would not inten-tionally embarrass Peter…or his family. But you must remember that in a small place like this appearances are everything.
Virtually everything.”
“It would have solved everything if I’d drowned,” I muttered to Peter just before he turned out the lamp and tiptoed out of the room. I was sliding swiftly into sleep, the awful shaking still at last.
“Don’t even say it, baby,” Peter said. “She was upset, that’s all. I’m going to talk to her. She’s always been stuck on appearances.”
“Well, then, the appearance of me dead should gladden her heart immensely,” I said, but he had gone and did not hear me. In another heartbeat I was asleep.
Mother Hannah kept me in bed the next day, though I felt fine, and Peter hung about the bedroom doing his best to entertain me, to stay at my side. He
brought up the tray of chowder Christina fixed for my lunch and had his own beside me, spilling a good deal of it on the bedclothes, and finally settled down on the room’s lone straight chair with a book. But the clear blue sky and the dazzling water out the window drew his eyes again and again, and finally I sent him away, saying that I thought I’d nap awhile. He kissed me gravely and tiptoed out, but his step on the stair was buoyant, and the
twang
of the screen door on the porch as he bounded out was jubilant. I knew he would head for the yacht club like a homing pigeon. I thought his anger at Parker would not last the day, with the great common chords of long friendship and the waiting sea between them, and I was right. When he came in that night, sunburn hectic on his cheekbones and nose, he said only, “Parker says to tell you he’s sorry he scared you to death, and he’s sure it’s going to be his fault if you never set foot on a boat again. I think he means it, Maude. He was pretty contrite.”
“Well, he’s right about the boat,” I said. “That was it for sailing and me. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No. Of course not. Not many women up here sail; you’d have stuck out like a sore thumb in a regatta. Oh, sometimes they crew for their husbands once or twice a summer, but it’s not really a woman’s thing. You’ll find lots of things to do that will suit you better.”
I stared at him for a moment; was this the man who had sworn we’d spend every waking moment in Retreat together?
That there wasn’t an inch of his summer world he was not eager to show me?
“I thought there might be some other things we could do together during the day,” I said tentatively.
“Well…sure. We will. We’ll go to Castine, and we’ll go berrying, and clam digging, and over to Bar Harbor one day, and have dinner at the Astinicou Inn. I don’t sail every day.
Some days are just too wet or wild. Or foggy.”
“Well,” I said, trying to smile and thinking I had been a fool to believe he would break the ironclad tenets of this place for an outlander wife, “you can’t accuse me of being a fair-weather friend. I’ll love you just as much in foul weather as I would have in sunshine, and I’ll see you at dinner at least.”
His face fell. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I sailed,” he said slowly. “It’s what I’ve always done up here. It’s…sort of what the guys do, if they don’t play tennis. Women have always seemed to like other things.”
Like calling every morning on women they’ve seen every day of every summer of their lives? I thought, but did not say. Like putting on stockings and dresses and passing around deviled eggs and lobster sandwiches to old ladies every afternoon, while the men stand in the corner talking about sailing?
Like driving a carful of blue-haired dowagers into the village or over to Castine to buy hair nets and kitchen towels and get permanents?
“I don’t mind, darling,” I said, feeling guilty at his crestfallen face and my own unbidden pique. Come fall he would be working like a slave for us, while I only kept a small house, and he would do so all the rest of his life. Let him have his days on the water. I would have his nights.
For the next two days Mother Hannah kept me busy with small household tasks, nothing taxing: sorting and folding the huge old double damask dinner napkins that had grown damp and creased over the winter; rinsing and polishing the ranks of blue and white Royal Copenhagen “summer” china and the breakfast Quimperware; polishing the candlesticks and bowls and flatware of heavy old English silver that had grown tarnished in the long cold months by the water.
“I really don’t know why we use the damask and
silver here in the summer,” she said once, fanning out a rank of twelve oyster forks. “They really are so hard to keep.”
“Why do you?” I said. “I’d think pottery and pretty cotton might be better for a summer cottage.”
She looked at me. Her blue linen morning frock brought out the chilly cobalt in her eyes, and I thought again what a beautiful woman she was, and how utterly unwarmed by humor or particularity. Her comment had obviously been rhetorical.
“We have always used these things in liberty,” she said.
“None of the cottages have pottery and cotton. It is so easy in a summer place to let appearances slip, you know.”
On my third afternoon of obedient domesticity, Amy Parker appeared at the screen door with a sketch pad and pencils. Christina led her out onto the sun porch, where Mother Hannah and I were making a list of things to be bought in Castine the next day. I nearly leaped on her and hugged her with joy and deliverance. I had begun to think her offer to take me sketching was merely polite talk, after all.
“May I borrow Maude, Mrs. Chambliss?” she said, kissing my mother-in-law lightly and dutifully on the cheek. “Parker says the weather’s going to change again, and we’re not going to have sketching weather for a while. I thought we’d go down to the beach just below Braebonnie. It’s quiet and sheltered there.”
Mother Hannah pursed her lips. “Well, I’d really thought Micah and I would show Maude about the borders and the picking garden this afternoon, and how to prune and trim.
But I haven’t seen Micah for days.”
She looked up at Christina Willis. Christina was a short, square woman only a few years older than Amy and I, but there seemed a lifetime’s difference between us. She had a pretty face, fair and serene, and thick, lovely taffy hair coiled up on her head, and her speech was that of an educated woman, though her accent was the flat nasality of Down East. The difference was more in her eyes; they looked as though they had seen a great deal, not all of it summer mornings and satiny old damask.
“Micah’s been at the boatyard with his father, Mrs.
Chambliss,” she said. There was no apology in her voice.
“Seems like everybody’s wanting to get their boat in the water all at once, and Daddy Willis isn’t as lively this summer as he has been. Micah said he’d be by this afternoon, but it would be late.”
“Well, then, I suppose it’s all right,” Mother Hannah said.
“It’s nice of you to think of Maude, dear. She needs to know our young women. But don’t stay too long, Maude; I think we’re coming to your parents for cocktails tonight, aren’t we, Amy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Amy said. “It’s Mamadear’s birthday. Hattie made lobster salad, and Parker is going to make champagne cocktails. They’re her very favorites; she’s so excited. And she has a new shawl Parker brought her from Hong Kong.
It’s really exquisite.”
“Well, she
is
a wonder,” Mother Hannah said. “So lively and interested, quite the undisputed queen of the colony, Maude, dear. How old is she now, Amy?”
“Ninety-six,” Amy said, smiling.
“Extraordinary,” Mother Hannah said, turning back to her list. Christina went back into the kitchen and I followed Amy off the porch and out into the pine-steeped crispness of the June day. It was like stepping into chilled champagne.
“Is she really ninety-six?” I said to Amy’s narrow back.
“That really is extraordinary.”
Amy’s back began to shake, and then she turned, and the lone dimple beside her wide mouth flickered and she began to laugh. It was the same sound I had
heard on my first morning in Retreat, light, liquid, irresistible.
I smiled.
“She is,” Amy caroled, “an extraordinary pain in the ass, that’s what she is. Pardon my French. Mamadear is the meanest old tyrant in the colony, and everybody knows it, including your mother-in-law. And there’s simply no doubt that she’s going to live forever. Meanness has preserved her like a salt mackerel.”
I gave a startled gasp and then began to laugh aloud. We stood on the sunny path down to the beach below Liberty and Braebonnie, laughing so fully and helplessly that for a moment I could not get my breath. My chest pounded with joy and liberation and relief. I had been right about Amy Parker.
“I didn’t think I’d ever laugh again up here,” I said, when we had reached the pink ledge of rock that crowned the tiny half moon of shingle. The tide was full in and lapped hollowly in the crevasses. The entire blue bay lay before us like an indigo satin blanket, scarcely seeming to move in the dazzle of the high sun. Far out, Islesboro drifted, dreaming; beyond it the Camden Hills looked as if a Japanese brush had inked them against the sky. It was the same view I had had from Parker’s boat, but this time I felt nothing but simple exaltation at its beauty and solitude. This would be mine always, this pristine, secret loveliness, this stark, pure joy. I could always come here and refill my emptiness.