I assume he cannot go back to the school, so he may go wherever he wishes and he had better start this instant.”
“If he goes, I go with him. I’m sixteen. You can’t stop me,”
Happy said, and her face was almost as white and old as Peter’s. I looked from one to the other in anguish. What would become of us now?
“Then do it,” Peter said, and turned and went upstairs.
The three of us stood in the twilight in the foyer of our home and looked at one another. I still could not speak.
“Mama?” Happy said, and suddenly my child was back behind that woman’s face. “Mama? We don’t have any money. We don’t have any other place to go. Can you talk to Daddy? If he’d just give Tommy a chance I know he’d like him. And he’d have a grandbaby….”
Tommy O’Ryan spoke for the first time, in a rich, musical tenor that faintly charmed me even as I recognized in it the practiced lilt of the born charlatan.
“I’m not such a villain, Mrs. Chambliss.” He grinned. “I’m on the ropes temporarily, but I mean to better myself and make a home for Happy and our babe. I’m a hard worker and I can make myself handy at anything. This was all a bit hasty, I suppose, but I do love your girl, and everything can still come right.”
I looked at him. Nothing would come right. Everything Tommy O’Ryan seemed and was and ever
could be was total anathema to Peter. I knew that viscerally.
But, oh, Happy!
“Mama?”
“Wait a moment. Wait and be quiet,” I said, and went into the kitchen where I had left my handbag. I took out the week’s grocery money that I had in my wallet and gave it to Tommy O’Ryan.
“Go down to the inn and get a room,” I said, my mouth numb with pain and shock. “I’ll talk with my husband. I can tell you now that I think it will do no good at all, but I can’t have my daughter out in the night with no place to sleep, and I think it would be better if she weren’t here for a while.
Wait in your room until I call you in the morning. We can’t resolve this now.”
“Mama,” Happy began again, and made a small movement toward me. Tears formed in her eyes and began to spill over the white-gold lashes that were Peter’s. I said nothing, and she came and put her arms around me and pressed herself against me. I held her loosely, feeling the hard new swell of her breasts, the rich, used curve of her young hips. My own tears overflowed.
“Go on now. I’ll call you,” I whispered, and watched as my child, my last baby, went out to spend the night in a hotel room with a man who would, I knew somehow, haunt our lives for perhaps the rest of our years. Then I went upstairs to talk to Peter.
It was a terrible night, awful past anything I had ever gone through with Peter. Even now I cannot remember much of what he said, and what I did; I have all these years later only a sense of anguish and finality, of hopelessness, of ending. I was not sure then what it was that was ending. Now I know it was any chance that Peter might ever truly connect with his yearning, destructive daughter. Poor Happy, she destroyed in that one night everything she had ached and burned for all her life. She always did that. Somehow, for Happy, the need
was the death sentence of the fulfillment.
By dawn we had hammered it out. We would allow them to marry, since I knew they would elope to Maryland or somewhere and do so anyway if we did not. Peter would do what he could to help Tommy O’Ryan find employment; I knew he could do that. We would rent an apartment for them close to Tommy’s work and pay the rent for a year, so he could put aside his salary for a nest egg. We would pay Happy’s hospital bills if Tommy O’Ryan could not, when the time came. We would see that Happy had a nurse for the baby for the first year.
Happy would visit us at home no more than twice a week with the child, preferably when Peter was not there. Tommy O’Ryan was never to come to the house in Northpoint again.
Neither of them was to come to Retreat.
The terms were hard. They were hard past, I thought, my ability to enforce them, but I would worry about that later.
I knew I was fortunate to have gotten any terms at all from Peter. I have never seen him so furious, so implacable. There was, that night, nothing at all in him of the funny, tender, luminous young man who had danced with me in the moonlight on the banks of Wappoo Creek. Oh, he still burned, but it was a cold fire.
Happy began to cry when I told her her father’s conditions the next morning, but I cut her off.
“Give him some time,” I said. “Try and do this without making a fuss, and give him some time. It was an awful shock, Happy. This is the best I can do, and I don’t think you have any alternative.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if it was Jesus Christ I brought home to him,” Happy sobbed. “He hates me, and he’d have hated anybody I wanted to marry. I should have known he hated me. I guess I did and just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”
There was nothing to say to that. Peter had never hated Happy, of course, but she had caught the essence of the truth about her father: he had never really loved her either. Not fully, not wholly, not without condition or boundary. It was that she sought and wept for on that morning. No, there was nothing to say. I did not answer her.
Two days later I stood in the shabby offices of a justice of the peace in a small village outside Laconia, rain falling steadily, and watched as my daughter became Mrs. Thomas Sean O’Ryan, and then I took the newlyweds to lunch at a little lodge near Lake Winnipesaukee, where Peter and I had spent the night once when we had first come to Northpoint.
I remembered that we had sat, that evening, on the shore of the great lake and talked of the upcoming journey to Retreat, my first. I had not, I remembered, wanted to go, sensing ahead things that would alter me, change my life forever. We had made love in the pine-scented twilight, under the trees; we had laughed. My poor child, no laughter for her on this day. But for her, too, a journey ahead that would change her life. And ours.
We did not see much of them that summer and fall. Peter did not speak often of Happy, and I did not push it. When the baby came, I thought, maybe, maybe…. Once in a while Peter was at home when Happy, vastly pregnant, came to visit and was neutral and pleasant with her. He refused to see Tommy O’Ryan. He refused to speak of him at all.
Happy’s son, Sean Williams O’Ryan, was born in January, and I held him and felt again that sweet, milky-smelling solid weight, and touched the silky-swirled crown of the red-gold head, and was for a moment blissfully, blindly happy. Now, surely, Peter could not deny the existence of this child. The baby was a portrait in blood. There was the unmistakable Chambliss chin cleft, and the same whorl of hair at the crown of the head. And the eyes: Peter’s gray instead of Tommy O’Ryan’s watercolor blue.
But Peter would not come. And Happy would not bring the baby to him.
“He can avoid seeing him for the rest of his life, if that’s what he wants,” she said coldly. “He’s mine and he’s all I need, he and Tommy. The hell with Daddy.”
“Fine with me,” Peter said, when I told him Happy would not bring his grandchild to him.
I looked at him, sunk now for so long in the chilly stillness, the flat grayness that his father before him had gone away into from time to time. Peter that winter was with me in body only, and then not often. He stayed late and long at Northpoint and went in early. We did not often talk beyond desultory, carefully channeled conversations, and we had not made love since the autumn before. I wondered often in those days if our lives would end like this, flash-frozen years and years before death. It was the unhappiest period of my life; after all these years, I can still say that.
One day in early August, as we sat with our books on the sun porch of Liberty, we heard the noise of a car stopping outside, and footsteps on the walk, and Happy walked silently through the cottage and onto the porch and put her baby into Peter’s arms and stood and looked down at him. She did not speak. Peter whitened and stared up at Happy and then down at small Sean. The baby looked solemnly into his face, his great gray eyes fastened on Peter’s, the titian curls on his head blazing in the late-afternoon sunlight. Then he smiled, and then grinned, a wicked and completely enraptured grin, and put his finger into Peter’s mouth and crowed with delight. Peter shut his eyes, and when he opened them he was back with us as completely and unreservedly as he had ever been. His whole face radiated his presence; his old fire flamed; his eyes crinkled with something that had never been there for his own children, and his smile reached out and wrapped the baby in.
“Well, by God,” he said to the baby. “What took you so long?”
After that Sean became, simply, his heart. Peter’s delight in him was endless, bottomless, almost ludicrous. It lit the cottage and spilled over me and trickled over Happy, and even reached out, tentatively and fleetingly, to Tommy O’Ryan. There was, at least, a moratorium on his cold contempt for Tommy. He did not go back to Northpoint as he had planned; he stayed on in Retreat and did all the summer things that he had once done: he sailed, and played tennis, and read before the fire at night, and took me for trips to Castine and Blue Hill and Bar Harbor, and once even down to Camden for two entire days.
And wherever he went, even sometimes out on the
Hannah,
small Sean went with him in the crook of his arm. Tommy, who had driven Happy and the baby to Retreat in the old Ford he had bought, had to return to his job as head of maintenance for the Northpoint motor fleet and left two days after he came…just in time, I thought, to spare him considerable grief, for in two days his insinuating manner and bluster and gaudy flamboyance of dress and manner and enormous ignorance of all the rituals and nuances that held the colony together had become painfully apparent, and thunderclouds were gathering in Peter’s gray eyes. But Happy stayed the rest of summer, and later in August Petie and Sarah and five-year-old Maude Caroline came for three weeks and stayed down on the beach in Miss Lottie’s newly refurbished house that we rented for them. The Sunday after the last regatta we christened Sean at the little chapel on the shore, and all of Retreat turned out for the small champagne reception I had at Liberty afterward. Peter carried
Sean in his arms all afternoon, and everyone exclaimed over the baby and praised him to Happy, and there was, just for that moment and that summer, nothing in my child’s face of want or need but only what was, for her, joy. If, when they looked at her, my friends and neighbors saw, instead of a young mother, a troublesome, malicious child and heard again the long-vanished cry of the ospreys, they did not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash let on.
Bless you all, I said to them silently, loving them, and to Peter, aloud, after the last guest had left and Happy had gone to put Sean down for his nap, “Bless you. You’ve made me so very happy this summer. I didn’t think I’d ever have you back again.”
He put his arms around me and held me close and rested his chin on the top of my head, as he used to do.
“Bless you, my dearest Maude. It isn’t you I leave. It never is. Don’t you know that by now?”
“Oh, Peter. Don’t leave any of us again,” I whispered into his neck. “We’re all here, every one of us, all together in this place I love more than any other on earth; that you love.
Nothing on earth could be better than this; this is what I used to dream of, all those summers…just this. All of us here. But it would be less than nothing if you left us.”
“Then,” said Peter, “I won’t.”
T
here’s something rather pretty and Norman Rockwell about us this morning, isn’t there? Three generations all together for a day at the beach?” Elizabeth Potter Villiers said on a radiant, restless day in June of 1961, on the little shingle beach below Braebonnie.
I shaded my face against the high noon sun and looked up at her. Against the lead-foil dazzle of the bay she was all silhouette: long legs sliding up into narrow, canted hips, the sweet line of her waist flowing unbroken to the deep swell of her breasts. She seemed outlined with silver light, as things do on our coast just before a storm breaks. She also seemed naked and nearly was; she wore one of the new French bikinis that were only that year beginning to be popular on American shores, and then only on those far to the south of Retreat’s.
Only the flash of her white teeth and the copper gleam of her sleeked-back hair broke the skin of the dull silver dazzle. I laughed aloud. Even in outline, there was nothing at all of Elizabeth that spoke to me of Norman Rockwell.
“Lord, sweetie, that makes me feel as old as Methuselah’s mother,” Amy Potter said, but her dark
eyes, as she looked at her daughter, gave the lie to her rueful words. Her white curls were covered with a huge red straw sun hat Elizabeth had brought her from Italy, and with her face and eyes flaming with joy she looked younger than I had seen her in years. Elizabeth could have told her she looked like Whistler’s mother, and she would have laughed her delicious, rich old laugh. Despite the strife and illness in Braebonnie, above us on the cliff, Amy was happy this summer.
Elizabeth was home from Europe for the first time in nearly ten years, and back in Retreat for the first time since she had left college and fled to Paris, when she was barely twenty.
Amy’s was, I thought—by no means for the first time that summer—a dangerous joy.
Elizabeth dropped onto the towel beside her mother, showering us with droplets of water. They burned like acid or ice. I knew the bay must not have reached sixty degrees yet, but she had been in twice that morning, this last time swimming far out into the dazzle until we lost her in its radiance. My skin shrank from the icy pinpricks, but Elizabeth did not seem cold. She sat cross-legged beside her mother, the bikini barely containing her deep, coffee-cream breasts, reached up and coiled the wet sheaf of her hair into a severe knot at her nape, and fastened it with an ivory skewer that looked like a poultry lacing pin. She was all over tawny that morning, the shades and colors of the veldt. A predator among us, I thought. A predator among adoring sheep.