“Happy and Tommy left an hour ago,” Peter said. “I saw the car turning out of the lane when I came downstairs. Just as well. I couldn’t have spoken to either of them. I’ve already called Petie and Sarah, and they’re going to come down to Northpoint and get Maude Caroline and Sally. Let’s just throw our clothes in the car and get out of here. Micah and Tina will close up, and I’ll call about getting the
Hannah
wintered when we get home.”
“Peter,” I said hesitantly, “about Happy…. You can’t cut her off now. Surely you see how badly she’s hurting. Let’s just try, darling: reach out some way, let her know she’s not alone.”
“She’s not alone,” he said. “She has Tommy. She has this brand new fruit of her singular womb. She has you. She’s a long way from alone.”
“Peter…”
“All right, Maude,” he said, and his voice was dead and level. “I’ll try. I’ll do my best with her. But I’ve got to have some time first.”
As if sensing the tenor of things with her father, Happy stayed away from us that fall. She did not even phone, which she had always done on weekends. When I called the little house in Saugus, she was polite, if subdued and weary-sounding, and did not mention her father except to ask after him perfunctorily. When I asked if she was all right she said yes; when I asked how her pregnancy was coming she said fine; when I asked after Tommy she said he was doing as well as he ever did. She did not ask to come for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and she did not mention
any plans she and Tommy had for the holidays. When I asked when her child was due, she said only, “February,” and when I suggested coming to be with her then, she said Tommy’s sister from Chicago had volunteered to take her in her little city flat, and Tommy wanted that, so that’s what she planned to do. Knowing a little of Tommy’s malevolently ignorant clan on the South Side of Chicago, I cringed at the thought of Peter’s and my grandchild coming into their superstitious and mean-spirited world. But I held my tongue. There was time to think what to do about that. I would figure a way.
It seemed to me that fall and winter as if we were proceed-ing with our lives via some prescribed set of external imperatives. It was as if there were some universally accepted manual for those who lived on after the death of a loved child, and we were trying our best to follow it as scrupulously as we could, all the while resolutely stopping our ears to the screams of rage and tearing pain and grief that flew about inside us like bats. I threw myself into my duties as chatelaine of Northpoint as I never had before, finding a kind of anodyne in motion and involvement, escaping anguish by the oiled wheels that seemed to bear me, machinelike, through the shortening days. Peter began, that autumn, a long-planned and often-delayed book, a memoir of his decades of minister-ing to the orderly boyhood of New England’s privileged sons.
It had a wry, graceful lightness to it, an affectionate but entirely unromantic vision of the boys who trooped and whooped through its pages, and I thought parents all over the Northeast would love it. Peter was a good writer, as he was most everything else he set his hand to, and nothing in the steadily mounting pile of pages that kept him late in his study every night would wound or threaten. It was as if, by holding many boys lightly in his mind and heart, he could exorcise the pain of the one boy who lay heavily at its core.
Both of us worked prodigiously. After a few weeks, both of us, I think, slept fairly well once again. Our lives went forward, and if we did not hold each other close for comfort, at least we stood shoulder to shoulder and looked outward.
It was serving; it would serve.
But sometimes…oh, sometimes, a pause would come to each of us, and we would find ourselves still and empty and caught without occupation, and we would stop and stare blankly at nothing at all, and we would have to think consciously then: What next? What is the next step here? What would the next action, thought, feeling be for someone whose heart had not been burnt dead and cold with loss? And when an answer came to us, that is what we would do.
I did this many times that cold, dark autumn. I know Peter did too. I saw it on his face and in his stance, just as he must have in mine. In this way we made our way toward Christmas.
On the sixteenth of December the telephone rang late in the evening. I was sitting in front of the fire in the den, feet up on the cracked old leather hassock, reading over the guest list for the Christmas open house following the choir’s Festival of Carols and Lights two days later, putting off leaving the warmth of the small room and climbing the stairs into the chilly dark of the second floor where our bedroom was.
It had been gray and marrow-chillingly cold for weeks—I had been right about an early severe winter—but so far no snow had fallen. Somehow the ironjawed dry black cold was worse than our customary felted white winters. We had had a hard time heating the big old house this year. I began to struggle out of my nest of afghans to get up and answer the shrilling bell, heard Peter pick it up, and sank back gratefully.
It would be for him anyway; the telephone pealed endlessly just before the long holidays.
I was frankly nodding over the
J
s when I heard the door to the den open, and when he did not speak, I looked up.
He stood in the doorway in his old cardigan, holding on to the frame, his face bleached and stiff. I felt my lips make the word
what?
but heard no sound.
“That was Elizabeth Potter in Boston,” he said, and his voice was thin and slow. “Amy died an hour ago. They think it was an aneurysm. She said she had a headache and lifted her hand to her head, and then she just…fell. She was dead when Elizabeth got to her. She wants us to come.”
I began to cry. I got up and went upstairs and began to pack my bag, and then I packed one for Peter while he made the necessary telephone calls and arrangements, and I changed and sat on the side of the bed while he showered and dressed for the trip, and all the while I cried. I cried for the vibrant young woman with the wild curls and flushed cheeks who had borne me up through my first days in Retreat; I cried for the woman with the rich laugh who had had, in later years, precious few reasons to use it; I cried for the slender white-haired woman who had so recently sat on the beach in a red sun hat and laughed once more in pure joy for the love of her daughter. And I cried for myself, because who was there now in Retreat who would laugh like that with me, who would understand and grin when I made a face at the oldest ladies who colonized so fiercely the rockers on the clubhouse porch, who would understand, and smile an answering secret smile, when the sky over Penobscot Bay bloomed with the great fire of the midnight sun? Amy was dead, and with her a great slice of my personal history. Peter was my heart, but Amy was my girlhood.
We got to the town house on Endicott Street where Amy and Parker had moved, once they sold the huge old family house, just as a red dawn was flaming over the Charles.
Elizabeth was out the door and into Peter’s arms before we had mounted the hollowed marble steps. He held her silently while she wept, and his face was empty of everything but pity and a kind of focused calm. We had not talked much on the long drive from Northpoint, only a little about the early days of our marriage in Retreat, and Amy and Parker’s, before things had gotten sad and frantic and ruined. But once he had said, “I’m going to have to do what I can for Elizabeth, Maude; you know Parker isn’t going to be able to. She’s probably going to lean on me. Are you going to mind?”
“Of course not,” I said, and meant it. “It was only this summer, when everybody was starting to talk…. Oh, darling, of course not. If you can help her, do. Parker may not even know yet. But surely there are other relatives; I know Amy has family in Vermont somewhere, and it seems to me Parker had a brother who left the mill and went out west somewhere, and there are some cousins in Salem—”
“And when they get there, I’ll be glad to let them take over,”
he said. “But please, until they do, just be patient. She’s still very much a child under all that European froofraw.”
And I smiled weakly and said, “Well, maybe
way
under,”
and he chuckled softly.
But when she came rocketing into his arms and buried her face in his neck and scrubbed it back and forth as I myself sometimes did, in affection or passion, something old and cold curled in my stomach and I had to force myself to put my own arms around her and gently disengage her from Peter and walk her back into the house. She was dressed only in a short peignoir of some green seafoamy stuff, over an even shorter nightgown, and her pink-brown nipples stood up in the cold. Her face was swollen and streaked, and her eyes were slitted with grief and a kind of desperate glitter, a wild anguish, almost a craziness.
“Come in the house, darling, and let’s have some coffee and get a warm robe on you and see where we are,” I said, and when we had wrapped her in her bathrobe and I had sat her down on the sofa in the living room and Peter had built up the fire, I wiped her face with a warm washcloth and smoothed back the wild red hair.
“Now,” I said. “How is your father taking it? And what did the doctor say officially? I know you haven’t had time to call any of your people, so we’ll do that for you, I imagine your family uses Fitzgerald’s; most of the old Boston families do.
Can I call them for you and tell them what hospital she’s in?”
Elizabeth looked at me, then at Peter. She got up from the sofa and went over to Peter, where he sat in a great Hepplewhite wing chair by the fire, and sat down on the floor beside him and wound her arms around his knees and laid her head on them.
“She isn’t in any hospital,” she said, and her voice was that of a small child, muffled and singsong. “She’s in there on the floor in the den. I didn’t call the doctor yet. I don’t know any doctors here, and I didn’t know what you were supposed to say. Daddy’s still upstairs asleep. Or maybe drunk. Or maybe he’s dead too. Warrie and his nanny are in the nursery on the third floor. They won’t get up for hours. I waited until Peter got here; I knew he’d know what to do. I put a blanket over her, though. It’s cold in the den, and I don’t know where the thermostat is.”
Peter and I looked at each other over her bent head. Amy must have lain there for hours; the call had come to Northpoint close to eleven.
“Sweetie, what have you been doing all this time?” I said.
“Somebody has to know about your mother, you know that.”
“Well, Peter’s here now, and you,” she said, still muffled in Peter’s knees. “I didn’t think anything would happen until it got light. I sat with her for a little while, but I got cold, so I came in here. I’ve been reading a little bit. And I had the radio.”
I shook my head in despair and looked at Peter. He simply shook his head too. Then he lifted Elizabeth up and walked her to the sofa and sat her down beside me.
“Go up with Maude and get some clothes on, Punkin,” he said. “I’ll go tell your father, and then we’ll get the doctor.
We have to have her taken care of now. You know that, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth said, looking at him with her oblique eyes.
“The doctor will have to take her to the hospital and declare her—deceased, and then Fitzgerald’s will have to get her ready for the services. We’ll take care of all that, don’t worry.
All you need to do is tell Maude where your mother keeps her telephone and address book. You and your dad can tell us who to call, and we’ll do that for you.”
“You mean they’re going to take her away?”
“They’ll have to, darling, for a little while,” I said. “It’s the law.”
“But then they’ll bring her back?”
“Well…no, they’ll let Fitzgerald’s come and get her, and they’ll handle things after that.”
“You mean drain all her blood out and put makeup on her,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was shrill.
“Honey,” I began. It was hard to remember that this was a thirty-five-year-old woman.
“No,” Elizabeth said.
“For her sake, Elizabeth, let us take care of her decently now,” I said. “You don’t want people to come and see her lying on the floor.”
“
No!
” Elizabeth cried.
“Elizabeth, this would distress your mother very much,” I said, struggling to keep my temper. There was nothing in this fragmented child of the fearless, flame-touched sprite who had shimmered through those long-ago summers in Retreat.
“She of all people would want things to go smoothly so they didn’t cause undue pain to other people. And I know she taught you that too.”
She was on her feet in one fluid motion, the sheer layers of nylon swinging back from the supple nakedness that was still browned from the sun of the past summer and many others. She ran across the thick old Aubusson and planted her feet apart only inches from mine and looked down into my face. She was much taller than I; she had to bend.
“She never taught me that or anything else,” she cried. “She never taught me how to live, and now she’ll never teach me how to die! I hate her! I’m scared and I hate her! I don’t know who’s going to take care of me now!”
I reached up for her and she slapped me, hard, on my cheek and fled back to Peter and wrapped her arms around him once more.
“Don’t you touch me!” she screamed. I stood shocked and numb, but I could hear the hysteria rising in her voice. I could not seem to move. Peter’s face had whitened at her slap, and he held her away from him with both hands and looked intently at her.
“You are not to slap Maude ever again, Elizabeth,” he said.
“You have had a terrible shock and we understand that, but you will not slap anyone again. Now get hold of yourself and go with Maude and get some clothes on. We have a lot to do this morning, and your son will be waking up soon.”
“No!” she shrieked. “I won’t go with her! I won’t go with anybody but you! I don’t care about Warrie; his stupid nurse will take care of him. I want you, Peter! I want you to stay with me…stay with me…stay with me…”
The shrieks had fallen into a regular rhythm, and her face was bone-white, eyes closed, mouth squared like a wailing child’s. Peter took a deep breath and slapped her smartly across the face, once on both cheeks, and the shrieking stopped on a long indrawn breath. She opened her eyes and looked at him.