She had changed in all the years since I had seen her, of course, and yet somehow she was the same. How long had it been? Probably the end of that awful summer when she had gone back to Boston and left Petie skewered and bleeding on his desperate love for her. She had been fifteen then: a child, but somehow as fully a woman as the one who sat on this
morning beach and sleeked back her wet red hair. All that had changed was the degree of the womanliness. What had been promise was now ripely fulfilled, and Elizabeth Potter Villiers was as beautiful and vivid and somehow implacably and sensuously innocent as a great predator.
And predator, I thought, was the right word. Behind her, I knew from the scraps Amy had given me and the colony gossip that had floated through those summers, lay a string of the dead and dying, both literally and figuratively. There had been two or three abandoned relationships in Paris and Greece and Spain in those first years abroad; a middle-aged French banker and his wife dead of murder-suicide and a crumpled note with young Elizabeth’s name in it; an abortion in Athens and Elizabeth herself near death from sepsis; more broken love affairs back in France, and a brief and savage flirtation with heroin in Paris, until young Toby Villiers met and married her and fathered the dark five-year-old who pranced naked in the shallows of Penobscot Bay this morning, chattering in silvery French.
And finally, the violent death of that marriage, and the flight to Italy and the sheltering hills of Tuscany, where Elizabeth found refuge in the arms and country villa of a Florentine baron of astounding wealth and charm. Unfortunately, the baron had, in the classic tradition of that worldliest of cities, a handsome wastrel son and a formidable feline wife. Both had dropped in unexpectedly at the villa while Elizabeth was there with the baron, and after a couple of tit-illating but tense weeks in which the baron and baronessa fought in hissing seclusion in the master suite and Elizabeth and the young baronet amused themselves in the taverns of the nearby hill towns and in other, more private places, Elizabeth had grown sufficiently intimidated by the baronessa’s
increasingly murderous ire and fled home to her mother with her child. As always, when catastrophe had fallen on her head as the result of her own actions, she seemed genuinely bewildered and wounded by this latest contretemps. It had always been Elizabeth’s vulnerability, the slight, sweet odor of the victim in her powerful musk, that gave the final piquant twist to her attraction. Even when you most wanted to shake Elizabeth Potter, somehow you wanted more strongly to protect her, if only from herself. Even I felt that.
Except for dark little Warrie Villiers and Petie and Sarah’s fat little Sally, we three women were alone on the beach.
Happy would not come near Elizabeth Villiers and had made that fact elaborately clear to everyone in Retreat. I never saw such instant antipathy, even in my emotionally naked child.
She would not even allow Sean to be in small Warrie’s presence, a fact that bothered Sean not at all, especially given the gap in their ages. He was, that summer, learning to sail his first Beetle Cat, the
Osprey,
and totally absorbed in it and the waiting sea. He was all light and length and sinew, like his grandfather, and all boy; there was never even a trace of the feminine about Sean, as there is about most other small boys. He scarcely had time for his mother and me, and as for Warrie Villiers, he only said dismissingly, “He’s a baby and a sissy. A frog sissy. He flutters his fingers, and his eyelashes are too long.”
I spoke sharply to him when he brought out the “frog,”
after waiting in vain for Happy to do it. She would not discipline her son and never had, and I knew Peter would lift neither a finger nor an eyebrow at anything the boy did. I caught the slow, small smile of satisfaction on Happy’s face at her son’s careless little epithet, and my face burned. Sean was nearly a perfect prototype of everything Peter and I loved in children; I would not allow him to be indulged in such ugliness.
“Whether or not you like Warrie Villiers is your business,”
I said crisply. “What you call him in my house is mine. That’s an ugly and prejudiced word, and I don’t want to hear it again, Sean, is that clear?”
He looked at me with his brows level over his gray eyes and his mouth twitching with the impulse to sass me. But he didn’t. He only said, “Yes, Grammaude. I’m sorry.” And my heart melted, even though I knew he was not sorry at all.
“Come on, Slats,” Peter said to him, avoiding my eyes.
“We’ve got a couple of hours before dinner. Let’s take the
Hannah
around Osprey Head and back. It’s calm enough, I think, for you to take the tiller.”
And they were off, the screen door banging behind them, before Happy or I could say a word. Even through my annoyance at Peter’s undercutting my discipline of Sean, I had to smile at the image of the two of them, loose and tanned in their khaki pants and polo shirts, hair flopping over their eyes, loping down the dock to the dinghy. Behind me, Happy said, “It’s really a lot of fun to play second fiddle to a child with your own father. Daddy
never
asks me out on his precious
Hannah.
”
Her voice was so childish and thick with spite and yearning that I simply did not turn to confront her. Though things were better with Happy during the years that she came to Liberty with her son than they had ever been before, there were small flashing moments like this one when I knew, wearily, that she would never be healed of her devouring need of Peter, and he would never meet it. I was tired to my very marrow of trying to mitigate, smooth, compensate. Sean was Peter’s heart and Happy was nowhere near it, and there was nothing I could do.
I could see, this morning on the beach, what Sean had meant about Warrie Villiers, though. There was indeed something feminine about the child, something knowing and accommodating and almost sly. It would not have seemed awry in a little girl; one would have smiled at the miniature woman hidden in the child flesh. But you noticed it in Warrie.
He did flutter his long dark lashes a lot, and look sidewise under them, mostly at his mother, and his long, supple fingers did indeed dance in the air, and flutter, and hover, their tips almost vibrating, over this object and that, without actually touching them. His voice was a fluting treble, normal in a small child, and the rapid French that spilled from his pursed pink mouth was only natural for a child born to a household where French was the first language. But somehow in Warrie those things lodged in the consciousness just a shade unpleasantly, casting just the smallest of shadows. I might have thought he was edging dangerously toward the irreversibly feminine but for his manner with his mother, and hers with him. It was more that of man to woman than child to mother; his hands were on her breasts and flanks and hair and nape as often and casually as they were on the shells and pebbles that he collected, and hers smoothed his silky brown nakedness all over with conscious delectation whenever he was near. I found that, even knowing the profound difference between Latin ways and those of this cold northern shore, I could not look at Elizabeth Villiers and her son after a while.
And I saw that, try as she might to notice nothing, Amy could not either. Otherness clung around them, mother and son, like a miasma. Otherness and a kind of danger. It was the danger I had tasted in Amy Potter’s joy that morning, the danger that charged any air where Elizabeth was, and always had.
I remembered Miss Lottie Padgett’s words, twenty years before, when I had fled to her in pain and desperation over Petie and Elizabeth: “Elizabeth will never be safe. A lot of people are going to suffer because of that.”
And so they had, already. And so, I thought, more would.
But not Amy. Oh, please, not my poor reborn Amy. I did not think Amy could take much more pain, not from this quicksilver prodigal daughter who was at the core of her heart. There had been enough pain already, from Parker.
After more than a quarter of a century of warnings from doctors, scenes, crises, alarms, heartaches, and humiliations, Parker Potter seemed finally and truly to be near death from the drinking he could neither tolerate nor stop, and it was to stand by her mother in this last and worst siege that Elizabeth had ostensibly left Italy and come to Retreat. But day melted into summer day and Elizabeth spent far more time on the beach below Braebonnie than by her father’s side. Most mornings she managed to coax Amy to sit beside her, and Amy grew smoothed and sun-flushed and lightened with love and laughter, even as her husband swelled like a mordant toad with the toxins his liver could no longer fight. I thought Parker drank, now, with a new and bitter defiance since his daughter had come to beguile his wife, and the storms and tantrums and outrages that issued from Braebonnie increased in number and severity. Scarcely a day passed that Peter did not drop what he was doing and dash over at some frantic telephoned summons from Amy or Elizabeth, and I had gone a couple of times, too, to no avail. Parker drank and stormed on. But Amy had her girl and her mornings in the sun, and so far they had been more than enough.
Sally came toddling to me, pink-nosed from the high sun and howling from a careless blow from Warrie, who was both older and bigger. I caught her
warm, wriggling little body into my arms and rocked her, glaring at Warrie. Was it only I who had seen the sly, sidewise little kick from his monkeylike brown foot? No, Elizabeth had seen too; she shook her head at her son, but she was smiling when she did it and made a little silent kiss to him.
He sent one back. I turned the glare on her.
“She should just kick him back,” Elizabeth said, stretching so that one rose-brown nipple escaped the dull black of the bikini top. Warrie giggled and she tucked it back in, expertly.
Her slicked-back hair shone as if lacquered, and she wore many gold and jeweled rings on her long fingers. With one of them she reached out and lifted Sally’s furious little red face up to the sun.
“Just kick him back,
chérie,
preferably in his little brown balls,” she said. “It’s never too soon for a girl to learn what makes a young man sit up and take notice. Lord, but she’s the image of Petie, isn’t she? I’ll bet he looked just like that when he was her age, all fierce and determined and stubborn as a little mule. I wish I remembered him then; the first clear memory I have of him is running after me yelling that he was going to tell if I jumped off the dock into the water. And I did, and he did too. Scared to death and furious, but he did.
We must have been eight and nine.”
She laughed, and then let Sally’s face go and turned to me.
“I wish he hadn’t felt he had to leave, Maude,” she said lazily. “I had no intentions of gobbling him up this summer.”
I felt my anger swell, and even Amy stared hard at her daughter, a blush staining her face. Petie and Sarah had left the Little House and gone back to Boston only a few days after Elizabeth had come. The entire colony knew they had planned to spend the
entire summer in the little cottage, which Peter and I had bought for them when Miss Lottie’s feckless son finally put it on the market, and I knew there had been a groundswell of gentle buzzing when they pleaded Sarah’s father’s sudden ill health and went back, leaving Maude Caroline and Sally with Peter and me. Most of Retreat would, I knew, remember the days of Petie’s desperate love for Elizabeth and put two and two together, or think that they had. Only Peter and I knew it was Sarah, her face white and set, who had insisted on leaving. I still did not know what had decided her, and I hoped I never would. If anything sufficient to send my son and daughter-in-law away from their long-planned summer had passed between Petie and Elizabeth, I knew as certainly as I knew the sun shone overhead that it had not originated with Petie. And I knew Amy Potter knew it, too.
“It just may be that one or two people in Retreat have plans that do not in any way concern you, Elizabeth,” Amy said crisply to her daughter, and Elizabeth laughed aloud, a rich, plummy, liquid sound. Light seemed to gather around her, thick as cream. She had lost none of that quality of luminous presence she had as a child; she remained, with Peter, one of the only people I have ever known who had it.
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said, and then, tilting her head and squinting at me, “Maude, I’d love to try you in one of my bikinis. You’re as lush as a ripe peach; you’d drive the guys up here berserk with those boobs of yours showing, and that tiny waist, and those hips—you wouldn’t last a minute in France or Italy. A Tintoretto, you are, or a Velźquez, with that black hair and those eyes. And just the right age for Europe. You should come back with me when I go.”
“Oh, but honey, you said you thought you’d be staying for a year or two at least!” Amy’s voice was almost a wail.
“Of course, Mommy. And I will. But sooner or later I’ll have to go get my things, and then there’s Warrie’s schooling….”
“Warrie should stay right here and go to Miss Dawson’s, and then to Choate and on to Harvard, or maybe Yale, like a proper Potter,” Amy said firmly.
“Somehow I can’t see Warrie’s dear papa letting him do that,” Elizabeth said, amused. “His family honor would be stained beyond repair. And he’s going to have to foot the bill for this chick, because I haven’t a sou. I had to literally pay ransom to get out of France, and then I had to sneak Warrie out in the dead of night. It was all very exciting, wasn’t it, Pippin?”
And she reached out and fondled her child’s hard little buttocks, and he squirmed against her in pleasure and complicity, and I picked up the sniveling Sally and said, “I think this pippin has had enough sun for the day. Her nose is on fire,” and turned to leave the beach. Behind me I heard Amy say something, sharp but unintelligible, and heard Elizabeth’s languid answering laughter. Enough of sun and indolence and flesh, I thought in sudden disgust. I wanted a bath and cool, starched, clean clothes for Sally and me, and a nap in a white room with a sharp little salt wind blowing through it. And then I smiled into my grandchild’s sweaty neck. I was, myself, a creature of sun and indolence and flesh; Charleston was surely a city of all those things, fully as much as Cap Ferrat or Rapallo. What a very long way I had come from home.