Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “If you’re serious about wanting this to happen again,” he said, “just come knock three times on my door. Any night. I’ll hear you.”

  And for the next week or so, I did just that, and we went on laughing and sparring across the dinner table, and teasing Grammaude and Zoot, and later in the dark night I crept out of Liberty and knocked at the door of Braebonnie and we did those things that he was teaching me, that set me afire and burned me to ashes over and over and yet never consumed me. He knew a great many. I assumed they were French.

  On our second night he used a condom, wryly and with distaste.

  “I feel like a sixteen-year-old,” he said. “You can’t imagine what I went through getting these. I had to go all the way over to South Brooksville to the drugstore; Mrs. Sylvester almost fainted when I asked at the store. I have a feeling she thinks the Cape Rosier sheep are in great danger.”

  I almost rolled off his bed laughing. I could just see it.

  “Warrie, you didn’t ride your bike all the way over to South Brooksville!”

  He had no car, but he had found an old Schwinn in the shed at Braebonnie and resurrected it and used it jauntily for his small errands. When I commiserated with him about the bike, he had just grinned. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Everybody rides them in France and Italy. It’s very chic. I’m actually bringing a touch of continental class to this oh-so-Yankee Cape Rosier. I wish I could find a baguette to put in the basket, though.”

  “No,” he said that night. “I hitched a ride with Caleb Willis. Told him it was an errand of mercy. And so it was. But I can’t abide these things. I know it’s ridiculous to think you could get your hands on pills up here, so I’ve called a friend in New York and there are some on the way. You must take them. They’re much safer, and they won’t hurt you.”

  “All right,” I said dubiously, and when, in a few days, the little packets came in to the post office, I did take them. But I never liked doing it. It felt…contrived. Cynical, somehow. I could no longer pretend to myself that I was being swept off my feet night after night.

  One evening near the end of July, Grammaude was waiting on the sun porch for me when I came in from the yacht club. Her face was strained and pale, and she did not smile.

  “Come sit a minute, darling,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Oh, God, she’s found out, I thought, heart beginning to pound. Somebody saw me. I sat down silently on the hassock to the big willow rocker and looked at her, small and erect on the chaise. Beside her Zoot grinned his Etruscan grin up at me and turned over on his back, his big feet sprawled in the air. I did not speak. I waited.

  “I heard something today that upsets me very much,” she said finally. It was obvious that the words were costing her. “Mrs. Winslow’s granddaughter—well, you know little Gretchen—met Warrie in New York just before she came here, at some party or other, and she told her grandmother that…that his mother had sent him over here because there was a very ugly business in Rome earlier this spring with the daughter of one of our embassy people. The child was only sixteen, and there were drugs involved, and an abortion that nearly killed her. I believe it could have been a criminal matter because of the girl’s age, but her father agreed not to press charges if Warrie…left. I think you will see we cannot have him here for dinner any more. And I cannot let you associate with him in any way. I know you’re fond of him—so am I—but this is way beyond the acceptable.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said calmly, around the ringing in my ears. Ice was forming around my heart.

  “Darling, I know it’s hard. I was inclined not to believe it either, at first, because he’s been so dear to us, and there’s been no evidence of anything, and it did come from the Winslows, but I had to check. You must know that. I called…I made some calls. Petie knows a good many of the embassy people in Rome through the bank, and he told me who to contact. It looks as though it’s true. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “It’s a lie. Somebody’s lying. People always will, about a man that attractive,” I said numbly. “I can’t believe you’d just…take anybody’s word for it…without asking him. Go on, ask him. I dare you.”

  I could hear my voice rising. I fell silent. This was not real, of course. She would talk to Warrie and he would put it all right, and the dinners would go on. My life would go on.

  “I intend to,” she said, looking closely at me. “I wouldn’t take any action without doing that. But until I do, I mean what I say about your not seeing him. You must obey me on that. I would hate to send you home, but I will if I have to.”

  “And just where do you think I’d see him if it wasn’t here at dinner?” I said bitterly, daring her with it. “Do you think we make mad love down at the yacht club on my lunch hour? Or in the dark of night in his little white bed?”

  And my heart gave a great lurch, for he did indeed sleep in a narrow white iron bed, with white sheets and a white cotton plissé coverlet.

  But she only shook her head tiredly and said, “Of course I don’t think any such thing. I just…I want so much to keep you safe, my dear Darcy. I wasn’t able to do that with my daughter. I hoped I could with hers.”

  My anger faded. Numbness flooded back in. Soon it would all be well.

  “I know that, Grammaude. But Warrie wouldn’t hurt me. Go ask him. Just do that.”

  She did do it, almost immediately. I waited on the sun porch, cradling Zoot in my arms, while she went around the house and over the stile to Braebonnie. Around the great humming in my ears I heard her call, “Warrie? It’s Maude Chambliss. May I come in a moment?” and after that I heard nothing but that profound, faraway shushing roar that always seemed to me to be the very music of the earth. You could hear it on Cape Rosier when the air was very calm. I sat still and waited. Soon, now, and then a gear would slip forward and life would flow on.

  She came back and her step was heavy, and I knew he had not convinced her that the story was a lie.

  She stopped before me on the porch and said, “Warrie will not be coming for dinner any more. The story may or may not be true—I believe it is—but he is a danger to you. His mother has always been unstable and a danger to others, and I believe the same is true of him. It’s a terrible, terrible pity; growing up the way he did, he probably could not be otherwise. But I cannot change that. We will not speak of it again. If you disobey me and attempt to see him I will send you back to Saint Anne’s immediately.”

  “I don’t believe you!” I shouted.

  “I cannot help that,” my grandmother said, and turned and went up the stairs. She was halfway up before I saw her thin shoulders slump. I didn’t care. In that moment I hated her as much as I have ever hated anyone.

  We ate our dinner in silence. His absence was stronger, more vivid, than his presence had ever been. He shimmered and danced in the air between us. I did not mention him, did not speak except to reply to the few sentences she directed to me. I tried not to sulk or cry, to keep my back straight and my face calm. Hers was as still as a death mask, and nearly as white. We did not speak of him again. She went to bed directly after the dishes were done, and the moment I saw her light go out upstairs I was out the door and over the wall to Braebonnie.

  He was waiting for me by the door. We did not go up to his bedroom then; we simply did it on the floor by the closed door, as if to keep our bodies apart for an instant longer would mean death by starvation. Only afterward did we go up the black stairs, and only when the door to his little bedroom was closed did he light a small lamp and a cigarette and look at me, smiling slightly. The smile did not reach his eyes.

  “You don’t believe it, then,” he said.

  “My God, of course not,” I said. “I could never believe such a thing about you. But who on earth could have started it? It isn’t like Grammaude to be so judgmental. You should stop it if you know where it started.”

  “There was a girl in Rome,” he said calmly, and my heart shriveled in pain and fear. “She was at the emb
assy. But she was twenty-five, not sixteen, and she was a telephone operator, not an official’s daughter. And I never forced her. I told you I don’t do that. I did, however, leave her. She was incredibly jealous and possessive. I cannot abide that. She told me I’d be sorry. Believe me, I am. I was very fond of your grandmother. And I’d be more than sorry to lose you.”

  “You won’t lose me,” I said, putting my arms around him. “We’ll just keep on like this until…until the summer is over.”

  I wanted more than anything to say, Until we go away together after Labor Day, but I did not. What he had said about jealousy and possessiveness rang in my ears.

  “If you really want to. But you can’t come through the house any more,” he said. “Why don’t you just take the screen off your window and put it back in when you go back? That way you’d be right at the wall and only a few steps from my front door, and you wouldn’t have to go through the house and around it.”

  “I will,” I said. “Her room’s upstairs and at the front of the house. She’d never hear me if I went out the window. Aren’t you smart to think of it, and to use this room where she can’t see your light? I wondered why you picked this little one, with the other big ones empty.”

  “It was my mother’s room,” he said. “I liked the idea of sleeping here too.”

  Later, when we had made love again and it was almost time for me to go home—there was the faintest hint of lightening in the black over the bay—I said, “Warrie, what did you tell her when she asked you about the story? Did you tell her about the girl at the embassy?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought she might have believed me, but then she said I mustn’t come for dinner any more, or see you. She seems to think I’m a danger to you.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I said I was no more a danger to you than my mother had been to her,” he said.

  “I can’t understand it,” I said. “Could your mother have been some kind of threat to Grammaude, way back?”

  “A girl not yet twenty? I can’t think how, can you?”

  “No,” I said. “I really can’t.”

  For the next couple of weeks we simply kept on doing what we had all summer. His check did not come but was promised, now, by late August, and so he had little choice but to keep to Braebonnie and work on his thesis. I had little choice but to go about my tasks at the yacht club as if the waiting nights did not sear at me like live coals caught in my clothing. Grammaude and I ate our solitary dinners and gradually began to resume, at least on the surface, something of a normal relationship; she smiled and talked of her usual summer interests and my next and last year at Saint Anne’s, and what I might like to do after that: what college, what plans for the future. But her voice was frail, and she seemed to fight tiredness all the time, like someone convalescing very slowly from a bad illness.

  I answered as lightly and noncommittally as I could, outlining elaborate college and career plans that would never happen, because, of course, I would be somewhere with him. I never doubted that. We had made no definite plans, but we had talked about it. It was enough to sustain me through anything.

  I had broached the subject one night, my heart sick and high in my throat because of the risk I was running. But I could live no longer without knowing that we would go on. Summer was ending. There was a new slant to the sun now, and the barberry hedge outside Liberty was tinged with red. I had seen my first ragged V of wild geese against the grape-flushed sky only the night before.

  “I saw wild geese going south last night,” I said lightly, lying naked in his dark arms. “You’ll be flying off with them pretty soon. I’ll be a lost sheep when you’re gone.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, reaching his dark head down to nibble at my breast.

  “Maybe not what?”

  “Maybe you won’t have to be a lost sheep.”

  “Why? Shall I come to France?”

  I said it lightly, but my heart was pounding so hard I thought he would hear.

  “You’d hate that, you little puritan,” he said lazily. He put his hand between my legs, and I pressed hard against it.

  “Italy, then?”

  “That’s even worse.”

  “Then how will I not be a lost sheep? How will I see you?”

  “I’d sort of thought I might stay over here,” he said. “See something of the country. Maybe finish school somewhere. I’ve only got a quarter more: that is, if my courses will transfer. How about Atlanta? Have they got good schools in Atlanta? Could I learn anything that would make me a good living in the land of Gone With the Wind?”

  “Oh, of course,” I caroled, my heart singing. “Georgia Tech has a great school of finance, and so does Georgia State. We could…you could go to school and I could work and help you finish—” I stopped, reddening. It was a big leap from school in Atlanta to a life shared there.

  “I don’t let women support me,” he said. “There are a lot of young French and Italian men like me in New York who do that, just hang around and live on what their women bring home. Eurotrash, I think they call us. I will not do that.”

  “It wouldn’t be for long, just until you finished.”

  “No. I want you to go on to college and get your degree; that’s a must. That’s not to say I wouldn’t come and be with you while you did it. You just can’t support me. I’ll manage that.”

  I heard only the “come and be with you while you did it.” Joy swept me.

  “I was so afraid you thought I was too young or too boring,” I whispered into his neck. “All those exotic foreign women you see all the time.”

  “Darcy, you are anything but boring,” he said. “You’re right; I see exotic foreign women all the time. But I don’t often see a living Venus on the half shell. You’re the first.”

  “And the last?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Oh, God,” I breathed. “I want…Warrie, let’s tell Grammaude. Let’s go wake her up and tell her. She’ll see that none of it was true, that you had…honorable intentions—”

  “No,” he said. “She isn’t going to believe me, Darcy. You’ll have to take my word on that. She’ll send you home—or worse, cut off your trust fund—and I can’t follow until my check comes. Don’t say anything yet. When the check comes, in September, we’ll tell her.”

  I had no trust fund that I knew of, but it mattered less than nothing to me.

  “Tell her…what?” I had to hear it.

  “Tell her whatever you want, love.”

  And so I sat at the dinner table in Liberty and told my grandmother great, sensible, and considered lies and waited for the coming of autumn and the check that would set us free.

  In the last week before Labor Day my period did not come. At first I thought nothing of it; I simply could not connect the absence of that clockwork red tide with what Warrie Villiers and I did in the nights at Braebonnie. Hadn’t I taken the pills? Hadn’t he said it would all be fine?

  But I had never been late before. And there was a strange rich feeling in the pit of my stomach, and a kind of quickening when I touched my breasts. Dear God, could I be pregnant? All the shame and terror that the nuns had implanted in me rose boiling to the surface, but I pushed them down and thought about it. Pregnant. A baby. Warrie’s baby and mine: a small real person with, perhaps, my red hair and his strong features, my white skin and his gypsy’s eyes. A baby, something we had made together that was ours alone, mine alone. Mine. A very grown-up thing indeed, to have a baby. He would be overjoyed, of course he would. A son. All men wanted a son, didn’t they?

  But somehow I did not tell him. The week wore on and my period did not come and I grew surer and surer, and I did not tell him. We made love longer, harder, more often in the nights than ever before, and I did not speak of it.

  Labor Day, I thought. I’ll tell him then. After my last day at the yacht club, after his check is here, while Grammaude is packing us up to go home. We’ll have to make definite pla
ns then anyway. That’s when I’ll tell him.

  And on the night after my last day at the club, after the debris of the last regatta had been cleared away and the commandant had given me my last pay envelope, and Grammaude and I had eaten our hasty supper, surrounded by half-packed boxes and suitcases, and she had gone to bed in preparation for our next-to-last day in Retreat, I went out the window and over the wall to Braebonnie to tell my love about his baby.

  There was a car in the driveway, pulled around to the front of the house so no one could see it from the lane. It had New York license plates, and it was long and sleek and low, obviously foreign, though I did not know what it was. I saw no evidence of anyone, but the light burned in his bedroom upstairs. Could his check possibly have come and he had bought this sleek machine with it? Where on Cape Rosier could he find such a thing? I knocked, the three knocks that were our signal.

  He did not come. I knocked again. He did not come. I knocked and knocked, puzzled, and finally he did come, jerking the door open abruptly. He was damp and naked, and wore a towel knotted around his lean waist. His hair was wet and his face was closed, impatient.

  “I got you out of the shower,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I made as if to enter, but he put an arm across the door and stopped me.

  “It’s not a good night, Darcy,” he said. “I have company. A friend from New York, unexpected. I’ll see you…later. Tomorrow night, maybe.”

  “But…I’d love to meet your friend,” I said doubtfully. What was the matter with him? Why was his face so distant and cold?

  “I said not tonight. It’s late and I’m tired. Go on home now. I’ll see you when…I’ll see you later.”

  “I had something to tell you,” I whispered.

  “It can wait,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Warrie? Where are you? Come back to bed, I’m freezing,” a voice called down the stairs. It was a woman’s voice. It was, like his, faintly foreign. I looked at him. The world wheeled and rang; my vision blurred.