by Anya Seton
“No, ma'am,” he shook his curly head. “There’s hardly a mechanical dingus been made that I don’t have the hang of.” He went behind the door and they heard the rattle of the handle and ringing burr.
“Well!” said Eleanor laughing. “Somebody certainly thinks well of himself. Henry, I’m utterly exhausted. We’ll be wrecks tomorrow. And as for you, Carla, I only hope you don’t get a tummy ache from staying up so late. Say good night to Grandma and Uncle Walt.”
The child rose and threw her arms around Hesper’s neck. “Marnie—” she whispered. “Don’t you think that’s an awful nice boy?”
Hesper kissed the child and murmured something; her eyes were on the girl and Walt. They weren’t looking at each other now, but across half the room, Hesper could feel the tension, the awareness.
“D’you think it would be all right tomorrow—” whispered the child anxiously, “if I asked him to show me an aeroplane?”
Hesper nodded as Eleanor said, “That’s enough, Carla. Stop dawdling.”
Carla kissed Uncle Walt, who smelled good, of salt and smoke. He gave her a playful slap on her behind. “You better scat, little one, your mama’s all boogered up!”
Eleanor sent him an angry look. Henry bade them all a quiet “good night.”
Hesper was left alone in the kitchen with Walt and the flotsam the storm had sent her. The quiet nice-looking boy called Tony Gatchell, and the smoldering dark-eyed little beauty, Maria Sylva.
She fed them both, and made up beds for them upstairs in the new wing. The girl tried to be helpful, and followed instructions silently and quickly. But whenever possible, she edged back into the great kitchen near Walt, who was drinking much less than usual, and once when Maria bent over his chair to offer a plate of the gingerbread, Hesper saw his hand reach out and touch the cloud of soft dark hair.
She longed to ask the boy what he knew of Maria, but fear restrained her. She did not want to know. By ignoring the foreboding it might be made to vanish into the limbo of all foolish worries. Ridiculous, she thought. The girl’s too young. She’s a Portuguese. He’s never seen her before. Just because he’s saved her life, and she stares and stares at him like a sick calf, doesn’t mean anything. Walt isn’t like that. But underneath she knew. The fear of loss, which had terrified her while Walt was out in the storm, had been true after all. Not, thank God, the most fearful loss of all, but from this night Walt would no longer be free. All his life at intervals, Walt had fulfilled his impulses. He drank and wenched and fought when he pleased, and she had learned to accept, certain of his eventual return, and of his innate love of home. But this was different, and never before had there been a humble, bewildered look in his eyes as he gazed at a woman.
She saw the long message they exchanged without words, as they parted on the upstairs landing, when she finally sent the girl to bed. Oh, I wouldn’t mind, she cried against the sharp pain, if it was one of our girls here, Sally Pickett or Madge Peach, I’d be glad. But this sleepy gypsy with the hot passionate eyes, the dark skin and the foreign voice...
Of the boy, Tony Gatchell, she did not think at all, but Carla did, before she drifted off to sleep in the little old east bedroom that had once been Hesper’s.
CHAPTER 19
IT WAS NOT UNTIL the following March that Walt and Maria Sylva were married, though for all that Hesper saw of him during the winter, they might as well have been married the day after the line storm that had brought them together.
Walt spent every waking instant, when he was not caulking and painting his boat or tinkering with his lobster traps, at the Sylvas’ yellow frame cottage in Devereux.
The Sylvas were devout Catholics, and Maria’s choice of a Protestant angered them. The delay in the marriage was caused by their prolonged refusal to consent.
Maria had a somewhat equivocal reputation amongst the youth of Marblehead, though Hesper resolutely closed her ears to the rumors, knowing well that nothing would stop Walt, whom Maria handled shrewdly despite her passionate desire for him. She would neither disobey her parents, nor give herself to Walt without the ceremony.
Hesper, seeing little hope of happiness for either of them, had sometimes been guilty of wishing for the latter solution, so that their physical obsession might eventually cool and everyone be spared the muddle and heartaches already bred of this headstrong alliance.
But the Sylvas at last gave in, and Maria Sylva became Mrs. Walter Porterman in the rectory of the Star of the Sea, the handsome new Catholic Church on Atlantic Street. Maria wore a looped and puffed white net dress bought readymade in Lynn, and a wreath of glittering wax orange blossoms on her stiffly waved and heavily brilliantined black hair. Nevertheless she was beautiful. Hesper, seeing Walt’s face as he greeted her, felt a final clutch of jealousy and desolation, then tried to put these unworthy emotions behind her. The thing was done and Walt was gone from her. He had bought himself a tiny cottage near the shore at Dolliber Cove. He wanted to be alone with Maria. Hesper had tiad too much sense to hint that there was plenty of room at the Hearth .and Eagle.
She stood in the corner of the priest’s parlor and watched the unfamiliar ceremony. Across the room Maria’s parents and a handful of cousins genuflected at intervals and whispered once or twice in Portuguese. They looked pretty glum. Maria should have married her own kind, like Sancho Perez, a rich man, an importer of wines. He would have taken her back to Lisbon for the wedding trip. There would have been a real church wedding with hundreds of people, and High Mass.
So nobody was pleased but the principals. Hesper had tried to explain this to Eleanor whose reactions to Walt’s marriage had ranged from outraged disbelief—“even Walter couldn’t do a thing like that”—to tight-lipped disgust. Which would not have concerned Hesper, though she was exceedingly tired of storms and explanations, except as it affected Carla.
“Of course, I’m delighted to have Carla visit you now and then, Mother Porterman. She loves it and you’re so fond of each other. But she’s at a very impressionable age right now—and please forgive me for being quite frank—you know, mixed up with the Portuguese—and she talks a lot about that Gatchell boy—didn’t you exercise any sort of supervision over her last fall?”
So Carla was not making her regular spring visit to the Hearth and Eagle. It was a bitter disappointment for Hesper, but she had not blamed Eleanor, who was expressing a real maternal anxiety, untempered by Henry’s calmer judgment, for Henry was attending a conference in London.
Maybe, thought Hesper sadly, I didn’t “exercise enough supervision.” She had let Tony Gatchell ride Carla on his bicycle to the little aeroplane plant and see his father at work upon one of the new flying machines.
And she had let Tony take the child sailing in Walt’s catboat. Walt had promised to do that himself, but he had been too much occupied with Maria. Tony was a nice boy, he had been kind to the child, treating her obvious admiration with bluff elder-brother humor. Gatchell was an old Marblehead name, nearly as old as Peach or Honeywood. But from Eleanor’s point of view, he was not a desirable playmate for Carla. His father was a mechanic and his mother during the summer months had waited on table at the Nanepashmet Hotel on the Neck. The Gatchells lived over a grocery store on Smith Street, and though Tony did very well in high school, he sometimes made slips in grammar.
Carla did belong to a different world. The world of great wealth. The world of travel, of speaking French as soon as English, of Miss Prynne’s Finishing School, and then debutante parties on Beacon Hill. It was not a question of better or worse, higher or lower. It was a question of difference. Oil and water, both very good things, but they don’t mix.
Carla had shown a rather excessive attachment, tagging along after Tony, even slipping down to Gregory Street to wait for him outside the aeroplane plant. But Carla was only ten. Yet, thought Hesper with astonishment, I loved Johnnie when I was ten, and I never stopped. Ah, she thought with dismay, Eleanor was right and I was stupid.
And it seemed to her
in the mood of depression into which she drifted after Walt’s marriage that her whole life had been punctuated by stupidities and errors of judgment.
She was entirely alone now at the Hearth and Eagle, and she had plenty of time to think. The boarders were not due until June and she found herself dreading their advent this year, for what alleviation could a houseful of alien pleasure-seekers give to this painful recognition of emptiness and futility? Sooner or later it came to most people, the bitter knowledge that nobody needed them any more, but to Hesper wandering around the honeycomb of rooms in her old house, there came further and more melancholy doubts. Had she ever in the past accomplished anything worth doing in a lifetime of clutchings and strivings?
Her life now seemed to her a long succession of dead-ends. The love that she had given to three men—what good had it done any of them, and where was this love now? Finished. Gone from the world as though it had never been, except in her own restless and unshared memory. She thought of her sons. Henry had never needed her, nor would she have been able to help him if he had, so essentially different were their patterns. And Walt. Through all the years he had been with her, had she not with foolish love blinded herself to the truth about him? He was a rash and feckless misfit, nor had she ever been able to help him at all.
One afternoon she went up in the attic and unearthed the old Pansy Album into which she had copied the poems she had written in her girlhood. She remembered well the way they glowed for her on the pages, and how she had thought them beautiful. But they were not. She read them now, the limping stanzas, the forced and fleshless little metaphors, and her face grew hot with an embarrassed pity. For in this too how lamentably she had failed, nor ever even tried enough. Like poor Pa, she thought, and reminded of the “Memorabilia,” she h.unted and found it at the bottom of the same trunk. She opened the dogeared pages covered with Roger’s cramped, tiny writing. He had always meant to have it copied properly some day.
Marblehead denizens ever must be,
Nutured and soothed by their Mother, the sea.
Hesper smiled faintly; her eyes moved to the attic window and the misty gray-blue horizon far to the east. Maybe that’s true. I thought so once.
She read on about the founding of the town and the arrival of the Honeywoods. The first winter as Roger had imagined it and the birth of little Isaac. The first community enterprise, the building of the Desire in Redstone Cove. She turned the pages, reading the history of her town. Roger had omitted nothing that he could learn from town records, from Moses Honeywood’s journal or from legends. And as she read she felt astonishment and a dawning pride. Roger at least had not entirely failed, for somehow through the stilted waltz-time couplets there emerged a recurrent pattern of struggle and victory, a starkness of courage and idealism as rugged as the town’s weather-beaten little houses and the sea-torn rocks it clung to.
I must get Henry to have it printed, she thought. Not for the public, she added to an echo of her father’s lifelong fear of ridicule. But there must be some who would not laugh.
The light in the attic grew dim and she closed the “Memorabilia,” laying it tenderly back in the trunk. She walked down the stairs to the kitchen. Though it was May a penetrating chill had begun to drift in across the water on a fog bank. The lighthouse on the Point o’ Neck began to honk its hoarse, mournful bray.
The fog and the cold made Hesper’s joints ache a little. She threw a knitted shawl over her shoulders and hesitated by the great fireplace. The fire had been laid in readiness for the fall. Suddenly she scratched a match and lit it. Who’s to care? she thought in answer to the guilt born of years of thrift and her mother’s spartan rule.
She watched the driftwood spurt into iridescent flame. The orange and blue and green tongues darted up into the chimney’s black throat. She sat down in the rocker. It was nearly seven but she had no interest in getting supper. Who’s to care? she thought again. She reached around to the work bag which dangled from one of the rocker posts and fished out her crocheting. She was making an afghan for Carla, who would probably never use it since her bedrooms at Brookline and the Neck were superabundantly furnished. But it brought Carla closer.
She sighed and began to rock, listening to the purr and crackle of the flames. The hearth fire gilded the old kitchen, and it lessened the loneliness.
The foghorn blared and died away across the harbor, and in the silence she heard a small scuffling noise outside the east window. She looked around to see two plump bespectacled faces peering at her through the window panes, two round mouths slightly ajar.
Lord a mercy, thought Hesper, exasperated, they’re starting early this season! She walked across the room and whipped the curtains over the window, and the vacant, faintly aggrieved faces.
This happened often now, since the Historical Society had put a tablet on the house wall. “Honeywood House. Earliest part built in 1630 by Mark Honeywood, one of town’s first settlers. Later parts added about 1750.”
Sometimes tourists rang the bell and demanded to be taken through the house. Sometimes they just goggled through the windows.
Walt always used to give his raucous chuckle. “Oh, let ’em be, Ma. They get pleasure out of gawking like they were at the zoo.”
But Hesper never got used to it. The Marblehead Historical Society was refurbishing the old Lee Mansion on Washington Street. Let the tourists go there if they craved to gape at the relics of a past in which they had had no part.
Hesper sat down again in the rocker. She thought of making some coffee, but lately coffee bothered her at night.
She finished the brown stripe on the afghan, pulled a tight pink ball from the bag, and began a new stripe. Might move in to the parlor and listen to some music—liven me up. Henry and Eleanor had given her a gramaphone for Christmas, and some new records. But it took too much effort to move into the chilly parlor away from the fire.
I should get out more, see more people. Maybe take the next meeting of the Arbutus Club here. But the Arbutus Club, under the capable leadership of Mrs. Orne, was deep in Browning.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:......
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me.......
Bah! thought Hesper violently. Doesn’t comfort me any. She finished several more rows. The banjo clock struck eight, cracking on the last notes as it always did now. If Charity had a telephone, I’d call and ask her to come over and sit a spell till bedtime. Queer how old friends came closer to you through the years even though they weren’t very congenial to begin with. But it was Wednesday night and Charity would be running a Divine Healing meeting. That’s where I ought to be, at our own Prayer Meeting. But she had never been able to get the comfort out of churchgoing that her mother had, though of late years she had seldom missed a Sunday at the Old North. The hymns were always moving, and sometimes there was a sermon that gave you a glow of determination. But it was hard to believe in a gold-paved Heaven. Hard to believe that Jesus kept a loving, helpful eye on every discouraged lamb.
I guess I’ll hot up some milk, she thought, should be something in the stomach before going to bed.
She went into the new kitchen and lit the gas ring. Almost right away the milk bubbled up around the edges of the pan. That would have taken a lot longer on Ma’s little old stove. Gas saved time. Automobiles saved time, telephones and steam ships saved time. Time for what?
She carried the glass of hot milk back to her rocker by the fire. There were some new novels on the shelves over what used to be the old stone sink, boxed in now to make a cabinet. Henry was thoughtful. He’d left a standing order at the Corner Book Store in Boston. They sent all the new books. She glanced up at the titles that had arrived last Monday. The Rosary by Mrs. Barclay. Bella Donna by Robert Hichens. Maybe I’ll start one of them tomorrow. She sipped the milk slowly. A big log burned through and fell to charred embers between the andirons. A sp
ark flew out and expired on the wide hearthstone.
She heard a crunch on the gravel, slow footsteps coming up the path. If it’s another one of those prying tourists ... Her mouth tightened and she listened for the thud of the brass knocker. But the footsteps paused, then came around the corner and up the kitchen path. There was one sharp tap.
She walked to the entry and opened the back door. She saw a tall caped figure under a wide, slouch hat. She had an immediate impression of shabbiness and eccentricity. Tramp, she thought with some disquiet, conscious of the great empty house behind her.
“Yes, what do you want?” she said, holding the door.
“Mrs. Porterman?” muttered the man, not moving. His voice was low and harsh. She saw that he rested one hand on a gnarled blackthorn stick, and in the other hand he carried a square black bag.
“Yes?” she said again. “What do you want?”
The man raised the stick and poked the door open from under her hand. “Let me in—” he said peevishly. “I’m tired.” He came up the steps and walked into the kitchen. She retreated uncertainly.
He stood in the middle of the floor in the full light of the gas jet. The wide hat shadowed his face, but she saw a thin, jutting nose and a gray mustache and pointed beard. He wore a voluminous brown cape with a velvet collar, and a tiny red ribbon gleamed in the buttonhole of his suit coat.
Her heart beat fast and she watched him, puzzled; though her fear was subsiding she edged toward the telephone. He stared around him in a leisurely way, his eyes under the wrinkled lids passing over Hesper with neither more nor less apparent interest than they did the furniture.
“Place hasn’t changed much,” he said. “Though we have. Why in the name of God did you paint the floorboards? Looks like hell.”
He took off his hat and cape and put them on the table. He had thick iron-gray hair, and one lock fell over his forehead.