I sighed contentedly.
“If rum tasted as good all the time as it does tonight, I’d be an alcoholic,” I said. And then looked over at Amy and grimaced. “I’m sorry. That was not the least bit funny.”
She smiled back at me and took a long pull at her coffee. “Don’t be. It’s been over two months since Parkie’s had a drink,” she said matter-of-factly. “I really think it might take, this time. The new place has got a good track record, and I truly believe the doctor there put the fear of God in him about his liver. Of course, he’s no bundle of joy to live with, but when was he ever? Besides, I know what you mean. I could sit here and drink this stuff all night, just the two of us. When was the last time we sat outside at night with nowhere we had to be? Just us?”
“The last time I can remember was just before Happy was born,” I said. “The night Petie and Elizabeth took the dinghy over to Spectacle and were supposed to be home by sunset, and weren’t, and Peter and Phinizy Thorne went after them. Remember? We sat right where we’re sitting now, wrapped up in blankets just like this, waiting. I know we must have been scared to death, but I can’t remember that. I just remember feeling as big as a cow and hoping another baby wasn’t going to be born in the Castine hospital.”
“I don’t think we were particularly scared,” she said. “Or at least, not that they’d drowned. Even then Elizabeth could outsail Parker. It did cross my mind that she’d be the first eleven-year-old child in the world to get pregnant, and we could have a Tom Thumb wedding. Do you remember that love affair, Maude?”
“Oh, yes,” I said softly. “I remember.”
Remember? That summer and the next two were burned into my mind and heart, fiber and retina and viscera, like the unending presence of great pain even after it has cooled. I would never forget that consuming, anguished love of Petie’s for Elizabeth Potter, which began when he was twelve, as long as I myself lived. I doubted that many people in the colony would, either. As for Elizabeth, who knew? She was, at eleven, as ardent and volatile and female as she would ever be in her careening life, and she certainly appeared, those three summers, as drowned and witched with love as my poor stumbling son. But Elizabeth’s passions never burnt her up. She might flame with them, crackle and shiver, shower the world around her with the sparks of her burning. But it was never she who blackened and curled. I thought, that night in 1941 on the dock, that Elizabeth, then fifteen and almost terrible in her beauty, no more remembered the conflagration of that first love than she remembered the day of her birth. It was never given to her to count costs.
From the time she could toddle I think I was afraid of her. Elizabeth Potter was somehow born without boundaries, without a capacity for self-governance or moderation. It seems a strange and silly thing, to fear immoderation in a baby; it is, after all, the essence of childhood. But even the most foolhardy child fears something, will flinch and wail at some threat. Elizabeth never did. What she wanted she went after with an awesome singlemindedness—and got. Where she wished to go she went, except when forcibly restrained, and then she simply shrieked until the restraints were withdrawn in exhaustion and capitulation. I have heard her cry like that for nearly twenty-four hours. In the end, no one could keep her off rocks and docks, out of boats and the sea. As graceful as a young mountain goat from infancy, she never seemed to hurt herself beyond an occasional bruise or scratch, to which she paid no attention at all. It was the others—Petie, usually, toiling in fear and desperation behind her—who fell, bled, broke bones. Long before I began to fear she would crush his heart, I was afraid that Elizabeth would kill Petie.
She had the Potter red hair, the color of living flame, and she would never allow anyone to cut it, so that by the time she was four or five it poured down her slim back like lava. Usually it flew free around her narrow head, but sometimes, when it was very hot or she had been in the sea, she twisted it up and pinned it on top of her head; she looked, then, like something Matisse might have painted, much older always than her years. She had Amy’s smooth olive skin, and slanted eyes from some piratical Potter mountebank ancestor, and the combination was striking, stunning. It was as impossible to look away from her as it had been, for me, to look away from Peter when he was very young. She had that same quality of absoluteness, that same still impact. Once, at a yacht club tea, when she was still quite small, she and my Peter were standing together drinking cranberry punch, and he was bending down to listen to something she was whispering in his ear, and Augusta Stallings brayed from across the room, “Look at those two. Like as peas in a pod. She should be yours, Peter; except for that red head there isn’t God’s bit of Parker in her.”
There was an uncomfortable silence, in which all eyes turned to my husband and Amy’s nine-year-old daughter, and a silvery peal of laughter from Gretchen Winslow, and then the seemly flow of Retreat conversation resumed as if no one had heard her. And probably few people remarked it; Augusta’s outbursts were as much a part and parcel of summer Retreat as black flies and no-see-ums. But three people had: Parker Potter’s flushed face went a dull magenta, Elizabeth’s small face lit with a kind of triumphant joy, and Petie’s dark round face went stiff and still with humiliation. I felt outrage and grief for him flood me like hot water. He was ten years old, and he knew that on some essential level he was not and never could be the child of his father’s heart. That knowledge had dogged his steps and chewed his heart since he was old enough for perception.
“Why can’t you be warm with him? Why can’t you play with him and wrestle with him and, you know, mess up his hair and swing him up on your shoulders?” I cried to Peter once, when Petie was little and had lurched away sobbing because his father had told him to take his ball and play with it in the nursery.
“I don’t know, Maudie,” Peter said, and there was real pain in his voice. “I do love him; God, sometimes I lie awake at night and think, What if something happened to him? What if we didn’t have him? But I just can’t seem to give him what he needs. Maude, he’s the neediest little creature I ever saw. Nothing is enough; hug him and he wants to be held, smile at him and he’s all over you for the rest of the day. It scares me. I can’t fill that bottomless hole in him. You can; sometimes I think you’re all he’ll ever need in life, and he’s all you need.”
He fell silent, and I looked across at him sitting in his old Morris chair beside the fire in the little den in Northpoint. It was his winter place; I still see him there in the cold months as I do running down the steps of the dock toward the Hannah in the warm months, the sun on his fair hair. His face on that night was miserable, and I felt the old stab of pain at his pain, that first and worst source of anguish to me. I have never been able to bear Peter’s pain. Even Petie’s was always easier.
“He needs his father too,” I said softly. “And you must know that it’s you I’ll need all my life. I had you first. If I lost Petie I don’t know what I would do, but if I lost you I would die.”
He smiled then. “Did I sound jealous? Maybe I am. I don’t think so, though. That kind of frantic, gobbling need…I just can’t face it, Maude. I have endless love to give him, but not my endless presence. That’s a sorry thing to admit about your only child, but I know it’s true, and as much as I hate it, I don’t think I can change it. I guess I got it from Dad.”
I remembered the times Big Peter had simply seemed to vanish from the cottage, often for days and weeks, and the time Peter had done the same thing, when his father died and the entire house of women had toppled down on him. Petie had come to me in his absence; no wonder to Peter he must seem mine alone. Well, I thought, so be it. As long as he loves Petie—and I know he does—I have presence enough for us both. I can supply the thereness. You can’t ask what’s not there to give.
But Petie did not know that, and the void where his father was not must have ached like a boil throughout his childhood. I wish I had seen it more clearly then. Nothing is ever so simple, I know, but I believe now if Peter could have been closer to his son,
we would have had less of the pain of Elizabeth, and perhaps none at all.
For it was absoluteness Petie sought, all his life, until the day when, at age eleven, Elizabeth raised her fiery head and really saw him. Something ungovernable, without conditions and limits; something to complete him. Even my love for him, as empathetic and often terrible as it seemed to me, could not fill him. But the volcano that was Elizabeth Potter could and for a time did, and the consequences were, for him, disastrous. Elizabeth seemed to enter into his flesh and ride him like a succubus; her will was his and he followed without a murmur where she led, and she led him into things that, in the fragile, perfect, small ecosystem of Retreat, went beyond mischief into calamity.
The physical bond between them was powerful and adult. They could not keep their hands off each other. Peter at twelve was still short in stature, and though his shoulders and hands and feet had gained bulk and strength, his face was still round and smooth, and his dark hair fine and silky in his eyes. Elizabeth at eleven was already an arresting woman, and I use the term advisedly. She had only the buds of breasts and her body was as long and slim and quick as a young sapling’s, but something looked out of her eyes and soft, volatile mouth that was light-years beyond childhood. But still, she was only eleven, and the constant touching and nuzzling and the long dense looks that shimmered between them would have been inappropriate anywhere. In Retreat, they came near to being pornographic. I warned Petie over and over, and forbade him to spend so much time with Elizabeth, and Peter finally came right out and told him to keep his hands off her or he’d be shipped back to Northpoint to summer school, and I suppose Amy must have said something similar to Elizabeth, because they soon stopped touching each other in our presence. Instead, they vanished together for long hours in the daytime, and that, I thought despairingly, was worse. But Peter said only, “After all, Maude, what can they actually do? They’re children. Do you really think they’re over on Buck or Spectacle screwing? Do you think Parker is going to come over here with a shotgun and force Petie to marry her? Let it go. They’ll wear it out faster if you do.”
But I did not think they would. I thought they might well be over on Buck or Spectacle doing just what Peter said. Petie was simply wild with love, blinded and thick-tongued with it. If they had stopped touching in our presence they had not stopped it anywhere else; talk flew like bees in the colony that summer. Mother Hannah, frail and waspish by then, was at me constantly about it. But no matter what I did, it was not enough. I was pregnant, that first summer of the great attraction, with Happy, and tired and uncomfortable and apprehensive about a new baby after twelve years, and whenever I tried to talk seriously about it with Peter, he seemed to melt away like fog to the water. In desperation I went to Amy late that summer and told her I thought we should talk about Petie and Elizabeth, and she burst into tears.
“Please, please,” she said, dropping her face into her hands. “I can’t talk about it right now. If you think something needs to be done, then do it, but just don’t talk to me about it! It should be obvious to you that Parker is one step away from killing himself drinking; it is to everybody else, and I never know where he is and who he’s with, and that old woman is driving me completely out of my mind with her demands and complaints, and she runs off every housekeeper I can find, and I think I may have had another miscarriage, and…there’s nothing wrong with Elizabeth! If that damned little goat Petie would stay away from her there wouldn’t be any problem!”
I put my hand gently on her curly head, nearly white by now, and went heavily back to Liberty. I should have known Amy could not help me. Everyone in the colony knew her world hung by the most precarious of threads, and Elizabeth was simply and inalterably the joy of her heart. Over the years Amy had lost several other babies, but somehow I did not think those losses had touched her deeply. Elizabeth was, for Amy, always sufficient.
We thought that the winter hiatuses away from Retreat would sap the attraction of its heat, but for two more years they did not. Petie and Elizabeth matured and met in far more than childish passion, and we had cause then, I knew, to worry about what they did in the long hours when they vanished. The second summer Peter took Petie back to Northpoint in mid-July and enrolled him in summer school after he and Elizabeth disappeared in the Hannah’s dinghy and did not come home until dawn, and Petie promptly ran away and came back to Retreat. When, in the beginning of the third summer, Ella Stallings found them entwined in each other’s arms in her and John’s boathouse, two of the three youngest Stallings looking on solemnly, Amy took Elizabeth back to Boston and ensconced her in the chilly camphor-smelling home of a Back Bay aunt, with a tutor and a governess. She was back within three weeks, having stolen money from her tutor’s wallet and caught the train from Boston to Bangor and hitched a ride on an ice truck to Retreat. I had a baby and an ill and impossible Mother Hannah by myself that summer; Peter had stayed behind at Northpoint for the first time in our marriage to serve as acting headmaster after Dr. Fleming’s first stroke. When Elizabeth appeared back in Retreat, stained with travel and exuding an invisible musk that my son flew to like a yellow jacket to overripe fruit, I found myself in Lottie Padgett’s fusty, chirruping living room in tears, quite literally at the end of my rope.
“What am I going to do?” I sobbed. “I can’t lock him up. They can’t lock her up. They’re too young; it’s no good, this kind of…of craziness. Everybody’s talking, including the villagers. Even if they were old enough, it’s no basis for any kind of permanence. This kind of intensity—it can’t help but damage their very souls. There’s no balance, no lightness, no sweetness…. Oh, what does she see in him? You can see what he sees in her, my God, but what can she possibly see in my poor awkward Petie?”
Miss Lottie brought comfrey tea and shoved a fat, plumy yellow coon cat off her chair and sank into it. For once the Little House was empty of children, though the smells and sounds coming from the kitchen indicated that something small and wild and orphan was in residence. The room, as usual, was cluttered beyond description. Just being there made me feel young and new and soothed again, made me forget I was sole custodian of a large old house and an ill and angry old woman and a chunky, grave blond toddler and a fourteen-year-old son who had lost his soul to a siren.
Miss Lottie let me snivel myself out, and then she said, “What does she see in him? Herself. She sees herself whole and complete and beautiful in a man’s eyes. She never did in her father’s, you know; how would you like to be a highstrung little girl growing up in Parker Potter’s house? What kind of picture of women could she possibly see reflected there? So she thinks she’s just nothing, nobody, not even there, until she sees an absolute blind adoration in some man’s eyes, and it’s like a mirror. She sees that in Petie. She feels whole again. Safe. No wonder she’s after him so desperately. Without him she just disappears.”
“But she’s not safe,” I said. “Petie can’t make her safe; that’s ludicrous.”
“No,” Miss Lottie said sadly. “Elizabeth will never be safe. A lot of people are going to suffer because of that.”
“Oh, God, Miss Lottie, our poor children,” I whispered. “We try so hard. I know Amy does. But it isn’t enough….”
She reached out and smoothed the tangled hair off my face. Her old fingers felt like twigs, warm and dry.
“You’ve been a good mother to Petie, Maude,” she said. “You mustn’t go blaming yourself for everything. Some things you’re just not going to be able to help. This is a bad place for some children, this colony. A bad place for little wild things. Even though I love it dearly, I’ve always known that. I’ve tried to make a kind of safe harbor here for the wild hearts, the different ones. They might be perfectly fine somewhere else, somewhere more in the world, but here…. I’ve seen them go to war against all this before. Not like Elizabeth, maybe, not so destructively, but it happens about once a generation. Sometimes they fight it, sometimes they run. You can’t do much about it but try and be there when they fa
ll.”
I thought of Big Peter, heading joyously each week for the Aerie, on the cliffs above where we sat now, and of my Peter, heading like a golden arrow to the sea.
“What am I going to do for my boy?” I said.
“I think, give him the gift of his whole pain,” Miss Lottie said. “Let him have the dignity of the full brunt of it, without his mama trying to shield him from it. Then it won’t be so bad when she’s off and gone. He’ll have a kind of map to go by.”
“You think she’s going to drop him, then?”
“It’s what Elizabeth is all about,” she said, and there was pain in her old voice, but strength and surety too. I came away up the cliff path to Liberty feeling cooled and smoothed and somehow infused with quietness. Perhaps she was right; perhaps there would soon be an end to it….
There was, within a fortnight. Petie came home at dusk one Friday after a day on the water with Elizabeth, looking blind and sick and white-bled, and went straight to his room and crawled into bed. He would not open the door when I tapped on it, and he did not eat the supper tray I left outside his door. When I tried the door again at bedtime there was no answer, and I was not in the least ashamed to go around the side of the house and peer into his room through the gap in the old shutters. He lay mounded deep under the bedcovers, obviously asleep.
In the morning he was gone by the time I was up, and I sent Christina Willis down to the yacht club to see if the dinghy was there. When she said it was gone, I walked over to Braebonnie and found Amy in the kitchen, putting an invalid’s breakfast on a linen-covered tray. She looked flushed and pretty again, young.
“Is Elizabeth here?” I said. “Petie’s gone in the dinghy, and I thought she might be with him.”
“No, she’s upstairs packing,” Amy said, not quite looking at me. “She said this morning that she wanted to go back to her Aunt Liza’s and take lessons at the Art Institute for the rest of the summer. There’s a new watercolor class starting Monday. Parker’s going to take her down in the morning. You know she’s quite gifted with her drawing, but we’ve never thought she was particularly interested—”
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