Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  The sound made me suddenly and savagely happy, the same dizzying rush of pure joy that I remember from my childhood. I can recall so clearly the last time I felt it: I was standing in a clearing beside Wappoo Creek on an afternoon in October, alone in the peculiar silence autumn brings to the Low Country, bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall. I don’t remember what I had been doing, only that I stood very still and closed my eyes. And suddenly such a smashing rush of joy and exaltation shook me that I could only hug myself and hold my breath against the onslaught of that pummeling happiness. Pinwheels of gold arced behind my closed lids, and then tears formed there, and slipped from beneath my lashes, and ran down my face. I don’t know what that moment meant, but I was somehow altered by it; after that I had a knowledge of perfect joy against which to measure experience. Nothing else has ever quite met it. Some moments have come close, but none had that quality of annihilation, of obliteration. I have always thought one’s knowledge of God should be like that moment, but unless that was mine and I misunderstood it, I have missed that transcendence. I never thought to feel it again, but I did, or something close to it this afternoon, when I heard the osprey call. It was gone in a breath, but I was left both shaken and soothed by it. A great, great gift for an old woman toward the end of her life.

  The very old can tell you about peace. They have fought through the black, sinking, visceral knowledge of death—their own death—that heralds middle age and come to the place where childhood meets them once more, and with it that ineffable treasure that only the very young and old know: the tranquillity of the moment. The contentment of living each day as it comes to them, wholly and with all senses. The young do it because they know nothing, yet, of pain and fear and the transience of their lives; the old because they know everything of those things and can bear them only by staying in the moment. Carpe diem may be the sum of all the world’s wisdom. I have always thought Horace must have been old when he wrote it.

  So, yes, the old can tell you about peace, but rarely about pure joy, and it came to me like a benediction this afternoon on the wings of an osprey somewhere in the air above me. I think the sheer, shattering force of it owed all to the fact that it was my child who drove the ospreys from Retreat, all those summers ago.

  After Mother Hannah died, the change I had felt in the air around Miss Charity Snow’s death was finally upon us. It’s funny that I never connected my heavy prescience, early that summer, to the death of someone in my family, but I didn’t. Peter still seemed to me, after all the years of our marriage, the most alive human being I had ever known, and one does not think of one’s children in terms of hovering death. At least, I didn’t. And Mother Hannah had always seemed to me simply eternal, even in her illness and fragility. So it was only later that I could look back and see that the darkness that fell down over us that summer dated from the night of her death. In the midst of it, I could only flail at it in pain and impotence, wondering despairingly what had happened to us and why.

  Peter moved through the hours after his mother’s death like an automaton, ashen and still-faced and closed. This time it was I who saw to the food and drink for those who came to pay their respects; the entire colony did, of course. I answered the door and the telephone, received the armfuls of cut flowers and the notes and telegrams, patted the frail, spotted hands of the old ladies who had been Mother Hannah’s contemporaries, smiled and thanked the younger women and men who had known her all their lives as the fixed star she had been in that small firmament. Christina Willis kept food coming, and Micah brought firewood and mowed and did marketing for me, and even Happy, sullen and clumping in her hated skirts and slippers, did front-door duty for an afternoon or two. Petie came from Boston and saw to the minutiae of death that can be so wearying and endless in a small, faraway place: the death certificate, the notices to the New England newspapers, the calls back and forth from the funeral home in Castine to Fitzgerald’s, the old firm in Boston that had handled Chambliss funerals since time out of mind, the services there, the interment.

  Peter went sailing with Parker Potter.

  When he came home, after almost two days, we fought about it.

  “How could you?” I said, near tears from fatigue and my unexpected grief and a real and living anger at him. He was freshly tanned from the time on the water, and the golden stubble on his face and shadowed eyes seemed to me then merely the ensign of carelessness and indolence.

  “It was easy,” he said tightly. “You just cast off, raise your mainsail, and away you go.”

  “You know what I mean. When your father died you went sailing. When Petie was born you went sailing. When your mother died you went sailing. If you don’t care about us having to do everything for you, you might at least give some thought to your mother’s old friends. They loved her too, you know.”

  “Too?” he said, his eyes suddenly fierce and stormy, like winter water. “What’s this too business, Maude? You know you never liked her.”

  I gasped as if he had slapped me. It was worse than if he had. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I felt my mouth tremble with the hurt and its unfairness.

  “I did better than that,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I loved her, in ways I don’t think you ever knew about because you weren’t around. And I stayed with her. I took care of her. Maybe we weren’t best friends, she and I; maybe I wasn’t ever the daughter-in-law she wanted for you, but I was here. It was because of me that you got to go sailing whenever you felt like it.”

  “Well, thank you, Saint Maude. It didn’t help much, did it? She still died,” he said, and this time there was no mistaking the pain in his face and voice. It was an older, deeper pain than I had seen there when his father died; that had been pure anguish, leaping like fire. This was dark, dull, endless. Peter would be changed by this. That twisted tie to his mother, which he eluded so long and so determinedly, had held after all; he had fled her all the summers of her life, but in the end she held him fast. My anger drained away. Pain for his pain replaced it; that and a swift cold fear. What would we be now, Peter and I? Who would we be, without her in the world to define us?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here. I thought we might have a very small service in the morning at the chapel before we go back to Boston. I called the new preacher and he said he’d be glad to do a little memorial, and Petie will call around and tell people—”

  “Whatever you like,” he said. “I’m going back tonight, though. I want to go home with her. I’ll stay at the University Club.”

  “But…I thought we’d all go together tomorrow afternoon on the train. Fitzgerald’s will meet her and take care of her. I’ve asked Mrs. Harris to open the house and get things ready for a little reception after the service, and Petie’s gotten tickets for us—”

  “I’d rather do this by myself, Maude,” he said, not looking at me. “Just a graveside service. I’ll call Dr. Constable tonight about that. Everybody will understand about not having people by after the service; I haven’t lived in Boston since I left college, and you never have, and most of her friends are dead. Hermie can do something later. It just seems better like this.”

  I stared at him.

  “Peter, she’s my mother-in-law. She’s Happy and Petie’s grandmother—”

  “Petie can come with me,” he said dully. “He’ll have to get back to the bank anyway. It would be better if Happy stayed here with you. I don’t know if I’m up to Happy right now, and anyway I’ve got to get back to school. I’m going straight there from the service.”

  “But everyone would understand if you took the rest of the summer,” I said, my heart pounding with dread, my mouth dry. “You know Charles can handle things just for a month or so. Peter, darling, take some time; you can’t pretend this never happened. At least give yourself time to heal a little. You can sail, we can picnic, we can travel around some.”

  “Now
that she’s gone and you’re free?” he said, and smiled at me, a terrible smile. “I don’t think so, Maude. Thanks just the same.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter said, and went out of the room and upstairs. When he came down, two hours later, he was shaved and dressed for the city, and he and Petie left shortly after that with Micah Willis, who was to drive them to the train station in Ellsworth, where the body of Mother Hannah had been put aboard a freight car. He put his arm around me when he left, and gave my shoulders a gentle squeeze, but he did not kiss me. It was the first time in our life together that he had left me without doing so. I fought the pain and tears as hard as I could, so that neither he nor Petie nor Micah Willis would see them, and only when the car had jolted out of sight down the lane did I let the tears come. But it did not matter, because Happy saw them and came swooping in from the sun porch where she had been eavesdropping, dressed defiantly in her oldest tennis shoes and dirtiest jeans, face mottled with rage and what I realized only later was pain, primed for attack.

  “You ran him off!” she howled. “You ran Daddy off and he said he was going to stay; he promised me he’d stay and we’d do things! We were going to go sailing and clamming, and he was maybe going to get us a boat, just for him and me because everybody knows you can’t sail…. Oh, I hate you and I hate that stupid old woman!”

  I saw that she was quite literally blind with tears, choking on them, and reached for her, frightened and shocked. We were all used to Happy’s outbursts, but this was the fury and grief of a much younger child, the words of a preschooler. I had been annoyed with her much of the summer, but I had hurt for her pain and outrage, too, and felt keenly my own inability to soothe and feed her needs. Petie, too, had been a ravenous child, flailing at his own emptiness, but I had always been able to quiet and fill him. From almost the beginning, it was Peter’s arms and heart and only his that Happy wanted. And as with Petie, he had simply been unable to give them. I never understood why this man whose love, whose whole being, so filled and completed me could not seem to connect with his children. Perhaps, I thought now, seeking to pull my anguished child into my arms, that was why. The thought flooded me with fresh pain and guilt.

  Happy flinched away from me and continued to shriek. She literally danced up and down in front of me in her pain and fury, but she would not let me touch her. The old sinking feeling of rejection and impotence that Happy’s vast, unquenchable hungriness always engendered in me welled up again, and I dropped my arms to my side and sank down in the old twig rocker. The abrupt absence in my heart and house—yes, my house now—of the two people who had so filled them for more than thirty years was like an abyss into which I had tumbled; I could not seem to drag myself out to minister to this suffering child. Oh, my children! Why had they both been born so furiously unfillable? Why could I not find food within for this last ravenous one? Why couldn’t Peter at least see what his distance from her was doing, even if he was unable to alter it?

  I sat still, hoping the tantrum would abate enough so she could at least hear me and be reasoned with. I knew Peter had not promised her his presence this summer or a boat; those were phantom mushrooms sprung from the soil of her need. I knew she was more upset and frightened than she would acknowledge by the sudden death of her omnipresent grandmother. And I knew her need to hurt Peter, to punish him, had been displaced, as it so often was, onto me. She did the same when she was angry and jealous of Petie, whom she perceived as my favorite. Still; I would be still and quiet until she quieted. I closed my eyes.

  Presently the crying slowed and lost some of its urgency, and there was a silence, which seemed to stretch on and on. I meant to open my eyes; a moment and I would do so. A moment…I was so very tired….

  “And you can’t even stay awake when I’m talking to you!” Happy screamed, and ran out of the house and slammed the door behind her. By the time I got to the front walk she was out of sight, and I heard her sneakers scuffling down the cliff path to the beach below Braebonnie. I started after her and the telephone rang. I paused, torn, and then went inside to answer it.

  I should have let it ring.

  She was beyond my control for a long time after that. She did not act out so much as she simply vanished for long periods of time and would not tell me where she was. After two or three incidents in which she came home on her bicycle long after dark, when I had been out and around the colony in the car, and had called virtually everyone I thought might have seen her, and was on the verge of calling the sheriff, I locked the bicycle up in the garage and hid the key. After a truly heroic tantrum and three days of black sulking, she seemed to accept her punishment with a modicum of the grace I had prayed for and asked me if I minded if she spent some time with Francie Duschesne, Christina Willis’s niece. Francie was, she said, learning to quilt that summer and had offered to teach her.

  “It looks like it would be fun,” she said. “And there’s nobody in the colony I’d waste a minute on. Besides, that awful Freddie and Julia said anybody up here without a boat was a drip, and I guess that means me.”

  She cut her eyes toward me, but I refused to be drawn into the boat debate.

  “I think you’d enjoy that,” I said, reaching out to smooth the fair hair off her face. I smiled. She was filling out quickly that summer, sliding rapidly from child into woman. Peter’s high cheekbones were beginning to emerge from the round pudding of her face, and my own full breasts were budding, as early on her as they had on me. I wondered if she minded, as I had. Surely some equanimity would come with maturity; perhaps this was the beginning of it.

  “I thought, if you’d let me, I’d take my bicycle over there,” she said. “The quilting frame’s in the barn behind the Willises’ boathouse, and it’s awful hot out there. I won’t be late, I promise.”

  I hesitated. I liked Francie Duschesne; she was the child of Tina’s younger brother, Clovis, a stern and old-fashioned parent who kept his daughter close by. At fourteen, Francie reminded me of Micah’s niece Polly at that age, though of course there was no relation. She was pretty and capable and bright, though very shy, and I thought she might benefit from Happy’s spirit as much as Happy from her decorum. But I did not like her older brother, Jackie. He was sly and sloe-eyed, far too old for his age, and had been in no small amount of trouble around the village: petty vandalism and wildness, mostly. And he worked in the boatyard with Micah and Caleb. Tina had told me at the beginning of the summer that Micah had taken him on as a favor to Clovis and she was afraid nothing good would come of it.

  “He’s sly and troublesome,” she said. “Clovis won’t see it and Micah won’t have it. I’m some worried about it.”

  I did not like the possibility of his proximity to Happy. But surely, quilting—and in a barn practically under Micah Willis’s eye—was harmless enough. And I knew she was lonely in the colony, and missing her father and grandmother.

  “All right,” I said. “But please, sweetie, be home before dark. And don’t get in the way of the men at the boathouse.”

  “I’m not interested in the stupid boathouse,” she said.

  And so she rode off each morning on her bicycle and came home each evening full of talk of stitches and patterns, and I gradually relaxed and let myself sink into the silence of the old cottage as into cool water. I did the things I had done for all those long summers, either at Mother Hannah’s bidding or, later, under her stern eyes: I gathered food and washed and polished silver and china; I wrote notes and gardened and visited about the colony and drove old ladies on their errands and excursions; I played a little bad bridge and spent afternoons on the beach below Braebonnie with Amy; and read, and listened to music, and went for cocktails in fast-falling twilights and had people in turn, and once in a while I played some earnest morning tennis with the Mary’s Garden girls. I cooked small suppers for Happy and me and sometimes Micah and Tina, and they came in the evenings as they always ha
d, and we laughed together, and listened and nibbled and drank.

  Only now I did those things for myself. In my house. And if Mother Hannah was still as immutably with us as she had been when she lay in her bed only two walls away, well, that spectral presence would fade. I might and did miss the woman I had come to know only this summer, but I hardly missed the one who had loomed so large over all the others. In August, I had Micah Willis cut the lilacs far back, and after that the cottage was flooded with a light that was both literal and figurative.

  “Yes,” I said to Peter when he called, as he did once or twice a week, “we’re doing fine. The weather’s lovely, and I’m making a routine for myself that I think I’m going to enjoy. And Happy’s made a new friend of Tina’s niece, and she’s learning to quilt; can you beat it?…Well, don’t laugh; it may save you the price of a boat…. I miss you, too. We both do. We’ll be more than ready to see you for Labor Day weekend.”

  I had not told him of my troubles with Happy. He had called the day after his mother’s funeral full of apologies for his behavior, and I had been so grateful to have him fully back with me, and so miserable at the grayness of the unhealed pain I heard under his words, that I simply could not add to it. And in my heart I knew I would do anything to avoid hearing in his voice the cold detachment that Happy’s behavior so often called up. I could handle Happy. I had already done so.