by Mel Bossa
Even if I didn’t enjoy these forays into wild boyhood very much, I still would have given up Eileen, Grandpa, the library, ice cream, my entire family for Chas—Chas at night, that is.
And if I ever felt doubts, he made sure of my continued loyalty by his infrequently but precisely timed gestures. If before I used to be made uncomfortable whenever I would catch Chas staring idly at me, now I knew that what he was doing was not idle; he was seeing in his mind what I had done with him only hours before or planning for that night. He would laugh his grown-up chuckle, then roll over on his back, scratching on the grass like a dog in the sand. Or while we were walking somewhere, he would put his hand on the back of my neck, a finger and thumb slightly pressing on either side, as if to show me how completely in possession of me he was.
He did that one Sunday afternoon, all the way back to Grandpa Lynch’s house from a boring, childish birthday party we’d been invited to and left early. Finding no one at home yet—they’d gone for a drive to Groton and the Coast Guard station—Chas and I had gone into the refrigerator for sandwich makings, then he’d gotten that look of intensity on his face and suggested, persuaded, and finally insisted we go up to our bedroom to do with the blinds closed and the gray afternoon shut out what we’d so often done only during the night.
That was the afternoon I realized that I could not deny Chas anything he wanted from me, the day I realized he had made a slave of me, just as he said he would during that first meeting, when he sucked the blood from my hand.
This came over me only after he had left the shuttered bedroom to wander off. The others had returned, and I went to sit out on the shore-side deck of the veranda, trying to read, failing, and pretending I wasn’t as terrified as I felt I really was of Chas’s hold over me.
Only Grandpa Lynch seemed to notice something was wrong with me that evening. While he was always too tactful to ask what bothered me, he stayed close to me the rest of the day so that I could at least feel the safety and comfort of his presence.
It helped, and I so much wanted it to continue that after our large Sunday dinner, as we sat back out on the veranda watching the sun begin to drop its orange ball from a blue clear sky into an equally blue ocean, I asked Grandpa Lynch to tell me a story, a true story about real people.
Grandpa looked at me and said he knew a true story, but that it was a long and involved story, did I think I was grown up enough to want to sit through it and try to understand it? It concerned Amity Pritchard and the Pritchard place.
Chas was leaning against the wall of the house, playing solitaire with the cards laid out on the planking in front of him. He said he was ready to hear it. So, I too begged Grandpa to tell me everything he knew about Amity Pritchard, everything, because I’d rather hear the truth—even if I didn’t understand all of it—than a story only told for children that hid the truth.
Grandpa must have understood my troubled mind then, because he filled up the pipe he always carried in the upper left-hand pocket of his shiny-with-age gray vest, lit it, and, puffing on it, slowly looked at me. He saw my pain and fear and uncertainty, and he began to speak.
Chapter 6
I met Amity Pritchard only one time in my life, he said, when I was about eight years old; so don’t expect me to tell you about her character or anything like that. I got impressions of her. I won’t say that I didn’t. But I can’t say how much they were colored by what I already knew of her from hearing others talk. Because even then there was plenty of talk about Amity Pritchard, although their property wasn’t all deserted and gone to ruin like it is now. Still, I did meet the woman—the lady, I should say, because she was a lady, the finest and of the first family in the entire county, even though she had been brought low by her particular destiny. But there she was, just as close as you are to me, and that’s a whole lot closer than many of those who talked about her could say, who never even laid eyes on her, or on the property, except from Atwood Avenue, much as they liked to shoot off their mouths about it.
Amity was wearing all black, I recall. A big black hat of the kind I believe women then called schooners, on account of they were so long and tall they took the wind like a set of sails at sea. Veils all over that hat; pointed veils like you don’t see anymore. And black clothing too. A short, jacket-like top coming down to her hips over a long black skirt right down to her feet, and a silk frilled front filling out the jacket at her throat and cuffs.
It was all that black that made me notice her. It was not a funeral we were attending but a christening, and black is out of character at a christening—except for the preacher who does the baptizing. But Amity was always in black—at least that’s what I heard people saying.
The child being christened that morning was a cousin’s son, which was why Amity was there. I recall everyone was sort of surprised to see her, even though it was her cousin’s first child at the font. They were Todds—on her mother’s side, the same people who now own the Pritchard place, although none of them ever lived there—but in Arizona, or California, or somewhere out West for the past thirty years.
As it was the first time anyone in town had seen Amity for five years, the first time since her misfortune, all the women were somewhat amazed that she came. It turned out to be the last time she ever left the Pritchard place too. A year later, she passed on in a most violent manner, as you can discover yourself just by reading the inscription on her stone in the Nansquett graveyard.
There were still one or two servants at her house then; a grizzled old Nigrah, older than I am now, which is considerably old, was driving the carriage that Amity came to the chapel in. There were no cars then. That was long before automobiles. All the servants were former slaves from the Southern states who’d run away before the Confederate War, as Amity’s father, the Reverend Pritchard, had been an abolitionist. Nobody ever knew how many of them were still on the place when Amity died. Some people said ten, and some a hundred. No one ever went near there after ’68, even though Amity was still alive and it didn’t have the reputation it’s gotten attached to it since. I believe there was only one Nigrah, the older driver named Saturn, who was deaf and ready to die and didn’t mind staying around, even though Amity was known to be crazy and wild and melancholic since the misfortune with her sister and that Union captain, Eugene V. Calder.
She stood right by me, three rows back from the christening font, not at front with the rest of the Todd family, so I got a good enough view of her, even with her veils. What I saw made me suspect people didn’t know what they were talking about. Amity didn’t look at all wild; not crazy at all; not even sad. She was still a youngish woman then—in her prime, and with an almost porcelain-white complexion, lips and cheeks and temples as white as anything I’d ever seen. Ladies did not go out in the sun in those days, except with a parasol. The only other remarkable thing about her were her eyes—blue eyes, so pale and blue they might have been like the sky on a sunny day. A pale blue, but strong too, and surrounded by tiny yellow lashes that made them stand out even more. Quiet eyes. Quiet and calm. I know they calmed me, when she looked at me, and then put one of her hands—gloved in black lace like her veils—on my shoulder, as though to steady herself standing there, during the ceremony. I kept looking up at her—amazed myself that this supposedly wild woman had such a young clear face and such quiet eyes.
Amity didn’t stay long at the christening, not as long as for the dinner afterward. Instead, as soon as everyone gathered around the Todds to congratulate them, she leaned over me, took a small package out of a lacy black reticule hanging off one of her wrists, and pressed it into my hand, whispering to ask me to lay the tiny damask gift alongside the other gifts for the baby. When I had and had come back to the pew, she was gone from the vestry.
I went to the door then and just caught sight of her getting into the big carriage. Once settled in her seat, she seemed to notice me on the church steps and motioned me over. “Did you lay down the gift?” she asked me in a voice as deep and calm as any
I’d heard from the preacher himself. “Yes, ma’am,” I answered her. “Here then,” she said, “this is for being so good,” and she reached into that reticule and pulled out an Eagle and put it into my hand. That’s a five-dollar gold piece.
It glittered so in the afternoon sun. I was surprised to see more money than I’d ever seen in my life, and I guess my mouth must have fallen open. “Don’t tell anyone I gave it to you,” she said then. “Don’t tell anyone until you’re a grown man. Then go and spend it on something foolish—on a woman is best. Some foolish trinket for a woman. Do you understand me?” Without waiting for an answer, she tapped on the side of the carriage, and Saturn drove her away. That was the last I saw of her.
I never did tell anyone about the Eagle she gave me. I hid it in the Bible I’d been given, the same Bible I have upstairs. Ten years later, when I was on my own in Boston, I spent the money just as Amity told me to, to take a woman to dinner and a concert of the Symphony Orchestra.
Several times after that I went near the road to her house, off Atwood Avenue, but I never did go all the way up to her house. And a year later, she was dead.
It was only at her funeral that I found out more about her; and only some twenty years after that, when I was studying to be an attorney at law, and was conversing with retired Judge Wilcomb, that I heard how it was that such a beautiful woman, so well-bred and well-off, came to be living alone years on end with nothing but one old Nigrah servant to tend her, and came to be feared and shunned and ostracized by the entire county.
It hadn’t always been so—and I guess that was all the more of a surprise to people. As I said, Amity came from the finest, the most prosperous of families. The Pritchards had been merchant seamen for several generations, living and operating out of Salem and later Providence and Bristol. But Amity’s father had been the second son of the family, an ordained minister of God, and he had come here to Nansquett about the year 1830, like many other Providence folk who’d visited here in the summertime, and had come to enjoy the area. Reverend Pritchard bought a large parcel of land along Twill Road, from where the highway entrance is now down to the river, where the big mill was put up. That was north of Nansquett and south of Scituate—just right for his large parish. For he was a fine preacher, upstanding and fair for all of his youth when he came here, social and educated and more elegant than any preacher that had been encountered in the county. He married a Nansquett girl, Martha Todd, and when his first child, a boy, was born, he began to build the big house that is in dilapidation today.
That’s where Amity was born in 1842, as her tombstone says; and three years later, her sister, Constance. Amity had an ordinary enough childhood, except that when she was just becoming a young woman, her brother—several years younger than Amity—caught scarlet fever and died. That upset old Calvin Pritchard more than it ought to have—children died of scarlet fever by the dozens every year. But he doted so much on his son and must have taken it as a judgment on himself from God, because of his pride. He was a religious man—as the girls’ names attest—and now he became almost obsessively religious, leaving more and more of his pastoral duties to his assistant minister and staying locked up in the big library at the top of the Pritchard house, poring over the testaments and the Apocrypha, trying to glean reasons for his afflictions.
The girls’ lives didn’t change very much. Their mother still considered herself the county’s social dictator, and they were better educated than was usual in those days, learning French and German, studying poetry and philosophy even, considered heavy going even for young men. Constance didn’t take much to this studying, but Amity did. She had a distinctly intellectual bent, and would amaze her young men callers with her facts and ideas and questions.
Both girls did begin to have callers in profusion, especially Amity, who was the elder and the more eligible. For besides being so learned, she had all of the more social graces—knowing how to play the piano and how to sing Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer songs with the best of the big-city women. She was always the first to suggest and invent entertainments, always the first to lead a waltz at the infrequent balls that were given in the area. Many young men confessed themselves struck to adoration by Amity. Including both of my own uncles. It was no surprise therefore when her engagement to Alfred Wilcomb was announced.
For all of her popularity, however, people were quick to notice that as far as her sister was concerned, Amity was devoted almost to the point of blindness. Although Constance was as pretty as Amity, she was far less liked and considered scheming and vixenish. She seemed to enjoy irritating, deceiving, frustrating, and humiliating her own smitten suitors. And her criticism of her rivals—including Amity—was both painful and accurate. Amity seemed not to mind a bit. She wouldn’t brook an unkind word against her sister and defended her staunchly. She sacrificed social affairs and friends alike to her sister, and instead of going out, spent as much time as possible with her. Constance was temperamental, flighty, and capricious. And Amity adored the ground she trod on. Folks just shook their heads and said no good would come of it, that Amity had best marry Wilcomb and get away from her family as soon as possible.
This proved difficult, for no sooner were the guns at Fort Sumter sounded than Amity’s fiancé volunteered for the Union Army. Many other young men joined up too, for war was glorious at that time, and the tradition against slavery was especially strong in this county, among Reverend Pritchard’s parishioners. Amity was as supportive of his decision as anyone else, believing that the war would be over in a few months at most and then she and Alfred could marry.
It wasn’t to be. Alfred was killed by a common shot at Manassas two years later; and Amity began to wear black for the first time. She was almost never to be able to remove it again, for scarcely was her mourning for Wilcomb over when her mother passed on. Then the Reverend died, and later on the others followed him to the grave.
No one seems to know when Captain Eugene V. Calder first met Amity. Telling me later on, Judge Wilcomb said that Calder had been instructed by Alfred to deliver a final letter to his fiancée. It wasn’t until after General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox in 1865 that Calder arrived in Nansquett with this letter. He stayed with his friend’s family. The judge, a boy of eighteen, remembered Calder as decorated, dashing, eloquent, and gentlemanly beyond reproach.
Evidently Amity thought so too, for she soon allowed him to visit her—ostensibly to talk about and to commiserate on the loss of her fiancé and his friend. When it was suggested to Calder that his stay in Nansquett seemed prolonged to the point of seeming to be a courtship, he denied it. A proud man, he went his own way in all he did: typical, people here said, of a Vermonter, for he was a White Mountain–bred man, and they are known to be an ornery, independent lot.
However much Calder denied his wooing, those who visited with Amity knew otherwise. She had bloomed as never before since Eugene Calder had come to Nansquett. The three terrible years of death and loss had passed, leaving in their wake a sense that all was for the best. If she had lost one good man, she had found a better one. She intimated to friends that as soon as her mourning period for her father was over, she would be dressed in the whitest of white. Calder needn’t buy land or look for an occupation. With the Reverend gone, it was all Amity and her steward could do to keep managing their farm and house. That she and Calder would be wed was soon accepted by everyone in the county, and no one was anything but pleased by it, for Amity was loved and respected by just about all then, and her own indisputable sorrows in a time of sorrow were much deplored.
I guess it’s wrong to say everyone was pleased with the courtship. Constance wasn’t, although we weren’t to find that out until after Calder had gone up to Vermont and returned again to Nansquett.
He was gone about eight months, which in those days of slow travel and communications was unsurprising, especially as all assumed he was closing his own affairs and readying himself for his new life. But the time of waiting began to tell on Am
ity. She ceased visiting as much as she had; almost, people thought, as though to avoid naturally curious questioning about her wedding plans. Nothing was settled. She would wait until Calder returned to announce their marriage, she said. When pressed on it, she would start acting strange, make jokes, become irritable—something no one had ever noticed in her before. It was about then that the postmaster let it out that Amity had received only two letters from Vermont and that her sister, Constance, had gotten more than a dozen.
When Captain Calder returned to Nansquett, it was much later than anyone had thought—summer instead of winter. He didn’t stay at the Scituate hotel or at the Wilcombs’ house as before but went right up to the Pritchard house—which astonished and scandalized a great many people. But it also made them certain the marriage would come off as expected. Or would it?
For suddenly it was no longer Amity riding alongside Captain Calder in the open carriage but Constance. As Amity was not going out calling anymore, a few of her family’s closer friends went to see her. At first they did see her—but she wouldn’t satisfy them about the curious turn of Calder’s affections. Whenever anyone became too insistent with her, Amity—always a lady—would excuse herself from the best parlor, saying she felt faint or was coming down with a migraine headache. This might have been accepted as mere eccentricity, but more than one such rebuffed visitor passed out of the hallway onto the big front porch, where Captain Calder might be seen reading to Constance aloud, or their singing and laughter would trickle out of the music room into the foyer. Soon Amity wasn’t receiving any visitors at all.