She was quiet, and I looked at her across the table and saw something that had not been there before.
“He
was
your boyfriend, wasn’t he? Lord, Grammaude, I was teasing you, but he was…something to you, wasn’t he?”
Dear God, part of me thought, what are you saying? You can’t say things like that to Grammaude. But she only smiled at me.
“Yes,” she said. “He was something to me. He
is
something to me. But not a boyfriend. Not…a lover. Only your grandfather was that, always.”
“But you loved him…Micah.”
“I needed him.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No. But in a way, a very real way, I loved him too, just not in the way you meant.”
“You mean you never…had an affair with him? Oh, why, Grammaude? You always were together, the two of you; I can hardly remember a day that didn’t have Micah in it. It could have been such a good thing for both of you, I mean, after all those years when you were alone, and then he was….
Was it because he was a native?”
She smiled. “Never that. It was…I suppose it was because of Peter—your grandfather—and Tina.”
“But they were gone.”
“Oh, no.”
“You mean, you and Micah felt you had to be faithful to their memories?”
“If you like. Gracious, what a conversation to be having with your granddaughter. It can’t be proper,” she said, and I knew she would talk no more today about Micah Willis.
Well, there would be time for that. The white peace swirled and hummed.
“I don’t see a thing of my mother in this house,” I said, looking around the dim old room. The warm smoke gold of the walls had not changed since I was small. There were amulets of family all about, all familiar to me. But I realized for the first time that I could not see my mother here.
“I see a lot of her,” Grammaude said, “but not the woman who became your mother. Only the little girl who was my daughter. She’s everywhere. Your mother never came here after you were born.”
“Because of the way Grandfather felt about my father?” I said.
“I suppose so, yes,” she said. “That and other things.”
“I’m supposed to get therapeutically angry at them,” I said serenely, “but I just can’t seem to feel it. I never have.”
“How can you?” Grammaude said. “It would be like getting angry at a couple of abstract ideas. You can’t get angry at your mother because she was never a mother to you. She was never anything to you, really; the running away and the drinking and the craziness started in earnest before you were old enough to remember her. She’s been in hospitals most of your life, and when she wasn’t, you were more like a mother to her than vice versa. And she’s been away in this last one for…what, seven years now? Eight? I don’t think she’ll come out this time. She’s just gone too far past healing. And your father…dear God, what was he to you?
All over the country, from one job to another, broke most of the time, hardly ever home, you in those awful boarding schools he picked out, never even letting you come to me except here in the summers…and the few months at a time you were both home you were taking care of him like a little wife. You can get angry at the
idea
of what they both were to you, or were not, but not at them as parents, because neither ever was. No wonder you can’t feel anything.”
She stopped, breathing hard, coughing a little, and drank off her wine. I stared at her. I had never heard her speak so of her daughter or the man she had married. I knew only that she paid my bills wherever I was, both before I left her that last summer and after, and that for most of the seventeen summers of my life she was its sole and very present polestar.
I had never considered how she might feel about Happy Chambliss O’Ryan, though I suspected what she thought of my father.
“I think maybe we’re both drunk,” I said. “And you may be right about all that. But somehow it seems to me very important that I feel the anger. My shrink says I really must, or I’ll never be well.”
She made a small noise of disgust. “What can he possibly know about you, this shrink? Let them go. That’s something the old always want to tell the young and seldom can; one of the few true things we’ve come to know in our lives.
Just…let them go. You can’t get them back as parents; they’re gone from you. Let go. Save your splendid anger for something worth it.”
“What is, Grammaude? What’s worth it?”
“You’ll know,” she said, “when the time comes. Don’t worry. You’ll know. And it will be a fine anger, one that can blow up the world. It means nothing
that you don’t feel it, except that there’s been nothing yet really worth it.”
“My shrink says I’m supposed to get angry with you too.”
“I rather thought you had been, all those years.”
“No,” I said in a low voice. “Not angry. Afraid to think of you, I guess; certainly afraid to be in touch with you. Afraid I’d run straight back to you and end up here. And now I have. Dear God, Grammaude, how can I just let twenty-nine years go?”
“Darling, I really think you haven’t any choice, if you want a life.”
I looked off into the darkness beyond the circle of the candles’ guttering light.
“I can’t see ahead,” I whispered. “I can’t see what comes next. Only white, like on a broken TV set: snow. I can’t see.”
“Why do you have to?” she said, reaching over to touch my hand. “Why not just rest in the moment? It’s what Retreat is for, exactly that.”
“I have to know.”
“Nobody does, darling. That’s one of the other true things I know. Nobody knows what’s ahead.”
“How can they stand it?”
“By taking nothing for granted,” she said fiercely. “By being willing to dare anything, everything. And then…by letting it go. T. S. Eliot said it better than anybody: ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to be still.’ ”
Later, after I had helped her back to the big bedroom and watched her smile at me and close the door, I went back and lay on the sofa before the dying fire. I knew I should get up and go upstairs to bed, but my head was spinning and the fire was hypnotic, and I was afraid I would lose the fragile envelope of white peace if I left it. I pulled the old Hudson Bay blanket that was always kept on the
back of the sofa over me and lay in the fire-leaping darkness.
I felt alone on the planet but somehow sealed in a cocoon of warmth and timelessness and nowhereness.
“I let you go,” I said to my mother and father into the darkness. “I do.”
Zoot came padding in sometime later and leaped softly onto the sofa and curled into my side, and I drifted, the fire whispering on one side of me, Zoot’s light steady breathing on the other.
“I let you go,” I whispered, and slept.
T
he next morning, those two malignant ghosts were gone.
I was sure of it, for the drumbeat of fear that had festered viruslike in my blood for the past two years was gone too.
Not muted, not in abeyance, but gone. I sat on the edge of the sofa in the chilly room, staring at the dead ashes in the fireplace and testing deep breaths, and then I leaped to my feet and ran to the porch and put my head out the screen door and sucked salt-sweet, spruce-sharp air into my lungs until I felt my heart would burst with it. Only then did I realize that I had not dared draw deeply of the air of the world for many, many months. I could have wept, shouted, flown off the earth with the joy of it. There is no way to tell how the absence of fear feels to someone who has not known it for a long time, someone who has been sure they would never know it again.
The bay and sky shimmered with the satin blue of early morning, and the water lay as still as a mirror, misted off at the point where it washed Islesboro and Little Deer. I could not see all the way to North Haven and thought we would have weather of some
sort later. Not, though, until twilight at least; that left all of this perfect day to run through the colony: down to the water, around to the yacht club, in and out of the birch thickets, up to the lips of the cliffs—everywhere I had run as a child, tasting it all once more, feeling once again its benison. I would look in on some of the cottages and see who was there; I would say hello to the people I had known before….
The fear smashed me like a breaking wave. I literally staggered back under it, and sat down on the edge of the chaise, and hugged myself, fighting for the breath that had come in deep drafts only a moment before. I put my head down on my knees and rocked, waiting it out. Waiting it out.
I don’t think I ever felt so hopelessly certain—even in the hospital—that there was nothing ahead for me but death.
There is a certain smug conventional wisdom that says suicide is an act of supreme cowardice. Even the impulse to it, many say, shows a singular lack of character, of moral fiber, of plain old-fashioned gumption. Brave people don’t do that. We used to laugh grimly at that in the hospital. The bravest people I have ever known, I knew there: the ones who got themselves through another day without ending their lives. Don’t think it isn’t possible to kill yourself in a mental hospital. There are quite a few ways, and by the time you have been inside a month you’ve heard them all. They are just about the only gifts the patients have left to give one another. It is easier to stay alive there, though. You are surrounded by people who are doing it with you. Outside…outside is dangerous. I sat on the screened porch of Liberty in that tender morning and knew I was in grave peril of my life.
And then the monstrous fear began to ebb, and soon it had slunk back to its familiar post-hospital level: simmering but on low. If I took my Xanax, if I moved slowly and lightly and did not breathe deeply, I could manage this day. But only with someone beside me.
It is nearly impossible to explain, also, how terrible the anticipatory fear of the fear is: almost worse than the main event. It is this foreshock, which shimmers around you like the aura of a migraine before it begins, that drives you to seek company, to avoid being alone at all costs. In the company of people there is a sort of shadowy baffle between you and it. It will have to go through them to get to you. Before the hospital I used to spend whole days in a mall, or tagging after an exasperated Hank on weekends when he did errands and played golf or tennis. I even once invited a Jehovah’s Witness lady into my apartment and pantomimed fascination; she stayed for hours and came back many times, and such were my straits that I was always overjoyed to see her. She must have wondered where she had failed when at last she knocked and found me gone. I would have let anyone in, bought anything, in those days.
Now I hauled myself up off the chaise and padded in to wake Grammaude. My shrink had said it might come back; well, here it was, and I would see it out, but I would do it in company. It was, after all, the deal: I would wait it out in Retreat, and Grammaude would provide the company.
I heard her coughing before I reached her door and knew she was awake, but when I came near I saw she had taped a message to the closed door.
Darling,
it read,
I’m going to
have a day in bed. The wages of sin. Can you manage? Food
in fridge.
And it was signed
MGC.
I stood outside her door taking careful breaths, eyes closed, struggling not to wrench the door open and go in and beg her to stay with me. And then I got a pencil out of the old Royal Copenhagen mug that stood beside the telephone and wrote beneath her
initials,
Booze is the answer. I’ll see you at dinner.
I signed it
DCO
and went downstairs and dressed and forced myself out into the day.
I decided on the shingle beach in front of the Little House where my aunt and uncle summered. Grammaude had said they were going to Bar Harbor this morning; that meant a full day, I remembered. And my older cousins were not in Retreat this summer. I don’t think they came often; girls who married out of the colony usually did not. I would probably have at least a part of the beach to myself. I could watch people that way, and dash into their midst if I had to, but unless things got too bad I could be apart from them too. It was no morning to meet the colony.
I sat on the top step of the Little House and watched brown children playing in the cold shallows. Like children in my time here, they had a sameness about them: square, towheaded, possessed already of long faces and definite chins, dressed in faded, unfashionable bathing suits with Yaycamp T-shirts over them against the bite of the sun. I could almost see my mother and my Uncle Petie among them, and my older brother, the legendary Sean. Even, if I stretched it, small Mike Willis and myself. When I first came to Retreat, according to Grammaude, I was laughing and fearless and gregari-ous, the darling of the colony. That was in the days before my remembrance began, before the disappearances of my mother came too often and lasted too long, before the screaming and the slaps and tears and rages started in earnest when she was home, before my father began to go to other cities and then other states “for interviews” and not return.
Before the trickle of coarse, middle-aged Irish “companions”
for me became a steady stream; before the green-walled, lino-leum-floored convent boarding schools that taught me guilt and self-disgust and patience. A very long time ago indeed.
My own child would be here now, if I’d amounted to anything, I thought, and realized that no matter how bitterly I had come to hate this place later, I would still, if I could, give my child the gift of Retreat summers. There was still, despite everything, a quality of timelessness and indelibility on this beach. It would be a powerful amulet for a child.
Then why had it failed me? Or had I failed it?
A tiny child, smaller than the rest, tagged after the larger children as they sprinted up the beach after their bored teenage au pair. At least that had changed; in my day it had been nannies or doting grandmothers. For me, it had usually been Grammaude. The older children looked back and laughed at the small one, and she sat down on the pebbles and wept bitterly, until the impatient girl came back and scooped her up, chiding her. The sting of tears surprised me.