That Camden Summer

by LaVyrle Spencer

  ‘‘Bully for you, but we’re not settling the question of whether or not you want me to repair this house.’’

  ‘‘Ask Elfred. He got me into this mess. He can get me out.’’

  Elfred cleared his throat and came forward. ‘‘Go ahead, Gabe, work up an estimate and bring it to me. We’ll work it out somehow between Roberta and me. She’s got to live somewhere, and this—I’m afraid—is it.’’

  ‘‘All right, I’ll look around. Excuse me,’’ he said to Roberta, touching his cap and leaving the room.

  The girls had gone exploring, and two of them called from the front porch. ‘‘Mother, come out here!’’

  She went to join Rebecca and Susan, who were standing at the porch rail, looking out through the rain. ‘‘Look, Mother,’’ Becky said enthusiastically, ‘‘we’ll be able to see the harbor from here, and all the boats, and the islands. I’m sure we’ll be able to see them once the rain clears. And the sunrises! Oh, they’ll be stunning, Mother! Just imagine, this railing and floor fixed, and our old wicker out here, and something with a delicious smell blossoming there beside the steps’’—she jumped over two broken boards and turned at the far end of the porch—‘‘and maybe a hammock here in the shade, for hot summer afternoons, and I’ll write a poem about the harbor and stand right here at the top of these steps as if this were the stage at the Opera House and deliver it for you while you recline on the cool grass with your toes bare and your throat lifted to the sky.’’ She turned to her mother in appeal. ‘‘I know it looks bad now, but we don’t care. We love it. We want to stay.’’

  ‘‘We’ve already picked out our room,’’ Susan put in.

  Roberta studied her daughters a moment. If there was one force that could stop Roberta on a dime, it was her girls. She was here. She had bought this rattletrap. They—bless their ignorance—thought it could be a home for them. Suddenly she bent back from the waist and laughed. ‘‘Who says I’m poor when I have riches like you? Come here, girls.’’ She opened her arms. They came and nestled up against her and linked their arms around her waist. There they stood, like three fishermen’s knots in the same rope, watching a lacework of rain skim off the porch roof and peck into the sodden earth below. The scent of fecund soil was primal, and the touch of the air rich and damp with the promise of summer’s green. The mountain at their backs protected them from the prevailing southwest winds. The earth dropped before them, and with it the houses and trees and commerce between them and Penobscot Bay. Below and to the right a section of roof on the Knox Woolen Mill presented a sheeny sheet of slate, and beside it the brick smokestack knifed up into the drear heavens where rain-mist shifted like smoke.

  A mackerel gull banked past, bleating a series of raucous yells, then flapped wings while settling onto the weather vane of a shed roof in a yard below. Roberta watched it all the way, till it perched and stopped shifting its tail. In Boston they had lived too far from the water. Gulls spoke differently inland than they did within sight of the ocean. The Atlantic’s presence gave these gulls a brashness she loved. Nobody could tell a Camden gull it must be quiet, or obedient, or proper, or that it must conform, or that it could not fly singly.

  Maybe she’d taken her cue from the gulls.

  ‘‘I’ll need some help from you if we stay,’’ Roberta told her two older girls.

  ‘‘Sure, Mother.’’

  ‘‘Of course, Mother.’’

  ‘‘And we won’t have much, I can tell you that right now. But neither will you be working in that mill.’’ She looked down on the dark gray slate roof.

  ‘‘We don’t need much,’’ Rebecca assured her.

  ‘‘You’ll be alone a lot. Do you mind?’’

  ‘‘Who’s the one who taught us ‘When you have imagination, you’re never alone’?’’

  ‘‘That’s my girl.’’ She jostled Rebecca, then both girls at once.

  The mackerel gull came back, still alone, still scolding. She watched its black eye gleam and its head twist in curiosity as it balanced above them, looking them over.

  ‘‘Houses have never been very important to me,’’ she commented. ‘‘Long as they’re warm and dry and have a modicum of laughter in them, and maybe some books and music, that’s enough, right?’’

  ‘‘Right,’’ the girls replied in unison.

  ‘‘So we’ll stay.’’

  Rebecca’s and Susan’s grips tightened on her waist, and Roberta fixed in her mind that she’d made the right decision. All it took was deciding it was so, and from that moment on she’d be content with her decision.

  ‘‘Where’s Lydia?’’

  ‘‘Upstairs exploring.’’

  ‘‘Shall we go find her?’’

  Smiling, the three went to do just that.

  Lydia was indeed exploring the house. She had read some of the newspaper headlines on the wall from as long ago as thirty years. She had culled some colorful glass floats from the flotsam left behind by Sebastian Dougal. They were scarlet and aqua blue and saffron yellow and would look just dandy hanging on the porch rail in the summer. She set her favorite one at the bottom of the stairs, then looked up, daydreaming, humming. ‘‘Sorry her lot who loves too well . . .’’ Earlier that year, at her school in Boston, she had played the part of Josephine in H.M.S Pinafore and was transported now to a ship on the briny sea. Dreaming of it, she doubled over with her forehead on her elbow and ran her entire arm up the gouged handrail, humming all the way to the top. ‘‘Heavy the sorrow that bows the head . . .’’ she sang as she idled her way into the rear bedroom, the one that looked out at Mount Battie. Its ceiling followed the steep roofline, and on one end it had a pair of long, skinny windows that reached to within inches of the floor. Before them, Mr. Farley was on one knee, examining the wall around the window and whistling very softly between his teeth. His whistling sounded like ducks’ wings when they flew low over your head.

  ‘‘Hello,’’ she said.

  He stopped whistling and looked back over his shoulder. ‘‘Oh, hello.’’

  ‘‘I’m Lydia.’’

  He pivoted on the balls of his feet and let his weight settle onto one heel, resting his forearms on his knees, letting his hands dangle between them.

  ‘‘It’s nice to meet you, Lydia. I’m Mr. Farley.’’

  ‘‘I know. Are you going to fix this house for us?’’

  ‘‘I think so.’’

  ‘‘It’s quite a mess, isn’t it?’’

  He let his gaze rove as if following the shape of a rainbow. ‘‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s not so bad.’’ He pointed with a knuckle while keeping the wrist over the knee. ‘‘That window in the other bedroom needs replacing, and it looks like it’ll need almost a whole new front porch, but the roof is shingled with slate, and she’s good for another hundred years.’’

  ‘‘This is going to be my room,’’ Lydia told him.

  ‘‘Oh?’’

  ‘‘Mine and Becky’s and Susan’s. Mother will take that one.’’ She pointed behind her.

  ‘‘Have you talked it over already?’’

  ‘‘No, but Mother pretty much always lets us have our way.’’

  ‘‘She does, does she?’’

  ‘‘Pretty much. Unless it would hurt somebody, or be bad for our minds. We want to stay, so I know she’ll say yes.’’

  ‘‘Why do you want to stay?’’

  ‘‘Because we have a grandmother here, and cousins and Aunt Grace and Uncle Elfred, whom it’s time we got to know, and because there’s an opera house here which Mother says we’ll frequent, and exceptionally fine schools, and if you attend high school here you don’t even have to be tested to go into college, they just let you in. Did you know that?’’

  Amazed by her spiel, Gabriel cleared his throat. ‘‘No, I didn’t.’’

  ‘‘Mother says education is paramount.’’

  Mother does, does she? Gabriel studied the precocious child. She was no higher than his armpit and rather the ragamuffin in scuff
ed brown high-top shoes with knots in their strings and a sacky brown pinaforeshaped dress whose patch pockets sagged. Her sandy braid was in disrepair; a fringe of hair had worked loose from it and she frequently shoved it back from her temples. Her nails were dirty. But her cheeks were rosy and her eyes as bright as a tern’s. Moreover, her vocabulary and elocution put Gabe’s own to shame. He peered at her more closely.

  ‘‘How old are you?’’

  ‘‘Ten.’’

  ‘‘You speak awfully well for a ten-year-old.’’

  ‘‘Mother reads to us a lot, and encourages us to be inquisitive about words, and to create.’’

  ‘‘Create what?’’

  ‘‘Anything. Music, poetry, plays, essays, paintings, even botanical exhibits. Once we wrote an opera.’’

  ‘‘An opera,’’ he repeated in undisguised surprise.

  ‘‘In Latin.’’

  ‘‘My goodness.’’

  ‘‘Well, we tried it in Latin, but we made so many mistakes that Mother got tired of correcting them, so we changed it to English instead. Do you have children?’’

  ‘‘Yes, I do. I have one daughter, Isobel. She’s fourteen.’’

  ‘‘Susan is fourteen. Maybe we’ll all be friends.’’

  ‘‘I’m sure Isobel would like that.’’

  ‘‘And Rebecca is sixteen. Susan and Rebecca do everything together, but I’m the baby and sometimes they won’t let me. But at least they let me put on plays. Well, I’d better go now.’’

  She swung around and collided with her uncle Elfred, who had just reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘‘Oopsy-daisy!’’ he said, sidestepping.

  She looked up. ‘‘I’m sorry, Uncle Elfred. I was just going to find Mother.’’

  ‘‘She’s downstairs on the front porch with your sisters.’’

  Lydia clattered off down the steps and Elfred joined his friend in the rear bedroom. ‘‘Well, what do you think?’’ he asked, stopping beneath the unlit lightbulb and reaching into his vest pockets for a cigar.

  Farley rose. ‘‘About the house or about her?’’

  Elfred trimmed the cigar with his teeth. His burst of laughter sent the brown nubbin flying toward a mopboard.

  ‘‘Take your pick,’’ he said, striking a match with a thumbnail and puffing to light the stogie.

  At that moment Roberta had climbed halfway up the stairs and was being followed by her girls. She swung around and shushed them with a finger to her lips and motioned them to stay where they were. Keeping to the edge of the steps where they wouldn’t creak, she tiptoed to the top and flattened herself against the wall, straining to hear what she could.

  Farley said in a lowered voice, ‘‘She doesn’t care much what she says, does she?’’

  ‘‘Or how she looks,’’ Elfred added.

  ‘‘Or how her children look.’’

  ‘‘She’s got plenty of what a man likes to get his hands on though, and that’s all that matters, eh, Gabe?’’

  Farley chuckled. ‘‘Well, I did get over here pretty fast, didn’t I? But, hell, I never met a divorced woman before. I was curious.’’

  ‘‘So was I. So I . . .’’ Elfred harrumphed. The smell of his cigar smoke drifted out past Roberta.

  ‘‘So you what, Elfred?’’

  ‘‘Well, you know . . .’’ This slyly. ‘‘I tested her a little bit.’’

  ‘‘Tested her? Why, Elfred . . .’’ This with teasing approval. ‘‘And you a married man.’’

  ‘‘It was just in fun.’’

  ‘‘What’d she do?’’ Farley was nearly whispering.

  Though she heard no answer from Elfred, she imagined an off-kilter grin implying whatever a randy mind wanted to imagine, before Farley replied in elongated tones, ‘‘Elfred, you devil you.’’

  And both men laughed.

  ‘‘Yessir . . .’’ She could tell from his speech that Elfred had the cigar clamped in his teeth. ‘‘She’s a fiery one, Gabe. Regular little spitfire.’’ He must have removed the cigar from his mouth as he went on in the confidential tone of one worldly stud helping out another. ‘‘A word of advice, though. Warm her up a little first. She’s got a belligerent side.’’

  ‘‘Thought you said you only tested her.’’

  ‘‘This was over the house.’’

  ‘‘The house?’’

  ‘‘She blew a cork when she saw the condition it was in and jabbed me in the gut with my own umbrella. Damnable temper on her. Damnable.’’

  Farley laughed. ‘‘My guess is you deserved it. And I’m not talking about the condition of any house.’’

  Roberta had heard enough. With her face afire she stomped squarely into the room and confronted the two men. During that moment of arrested motion when everyone present knew exactly what the whispering and snickering had been about, she fixed her glacial eyes on Farley.

  ‘‘When can you begin work?’’

  Farley hadn’t even the grace to blush. ‘‘Tomorrow.’’

  ‘‘And, Elfred . . . you shall pay.’’ Her manner gave second meaning to the statement that nobody could mistake. ‘‘And you shall make sure Grace knows about it, so there’s no trouble later between her and me.’’

  ‘‘I’ll make sure.’’

  ‘‘And you’’—she skewered Farley with contempt in her eyes, putting a distasteful subtone in the word— ‘‘shall make sure you complete the job and get out of here in the shortest time possible, is that clear?’’

  ‘‘Yes, ma’am,’’ he said. ‘‘Anything you say.’’

  She executed an about-face as regally as if dressed in hooped taffeta, and headed for the door. ‘‘The drays are here with my belongings. Would you please help the teamsters unload.’’

  It was far from a request: It was an order issued in the tone of one whose disgust is so complete she can cope with it no other way than to turn her back on the subjects of that disgust.

  When she was gone, Gabe and Elfred exchanged silent messages with their eyebrows, then snickered once again.

  Three

  Her furniture was as ill kempt as she, a lackluster collection of pieces that would serve the purpose of holding people or possessions, but would do nothing, aesthetically, to enhance their lives. ‘‘Oh, don’t worry about the rain,’’ she told the draymen, ‘‘just bring it right in here!’’

  ‘‘Perhaps you should stay with us tonight, Birdy,’’ Elfred said.

  ‘‘Not on your life. What would you do with four of us?’’

  Elfred didn’t know what they’d do with four of them. He had suggested the polite thing but was, in fact, relieved she didn’t take him up on his offer.

  ‘‘This is our house. These are our things. We’ll get along. Well, don’t just stand there, Farley, make yourself useful! You too, Elfred.’’

  Elfred got soaked. It gave Roberta a vindictive lift to see him gazing down at his wet wool suit, worrying about it shrinking two sizes. Farley, still in his browncolored oilskins, fared much better, so she made sure he helped the draymen carry the heaviest pieces, including the upright piano that she hoped would leave him with a hernia the size of a turnip.

  Whisper, would they?

  Damned foul species. Let them haul like beasts of burden: That much men could do. But in Roberta Jewett’s book, they were good for little else.

  Elfred quite disliked being put upon to do such physical labor and decided he needed to get to his office the moment he could conveniently scramble off.

  Farley went, too.

  Roberta sent the girls upstairs with instructions to unpack some cartons of clothing and bedding. She went into the living room and perused the collection of crates and trunks stacked in one corner like a Chinese jigsaw, wondering where she might find kitchen equipment in all those boxes. It was nearly midday and the girls would be getting hungry. She should go find a grocery store and put in some supplies, light a fire to take off the chill, attempt to unearth her teakettle and the washbasin and some bucke
ts, rags and towels. Suddenly it seemed too overwhelming to face. Besides, the air coming in the open front door—though damp—brought the smell of the ocean and of the earth greening and lilacs budding, and the sound of gulls and distant bell buoys, which she’d always loved. So she located the legs of the marble-and-claw-foot piano stool sticking out of the mountain of crates, removed a bunch of cartons from in front of the piano, opened the key cover, sat down and played ‘‘Art Is Calling for Me’’ from Naughty Marietta. She lit into it with robust energy, and ten bars in heard the girls begin to sing upstairs.

  ‘‘Mama is a queen . . . and Papa is a king . . . so I am a princess and I know it.’’

  Suddenly Roberta Jewett felt incredibly happy.

  She had her girls, and a place to keep them, and a job waiting. There was no husband to take what was hers or to make a fool of her anymore. Beyond the front porch the view of the harbor waited for her to enjoy anytime she wanted to lean against the doorjamb and bask. She had made a new start, and she and her girls were going to be very, very happy from now on.

  With a nimble arpeggio she finished the song, spun around on the piano stool . . .

  And found herself face-to-face with Gabriel Farley.

  He was relaxed against the doorjamb with his hands tucked under his armpits as if he’d been there awhile.

  Her face soured. ‘‘I thought you were gone.’’

  ‘‘I was. I came back.’’

  ‘‘Well, you might have knocked.’’ She spun back to the piano, slammed the key cover and spiked to her feet.

  ‘‘I did, but you didn’t hear me above the racket.’’

  ‘‘Racket?’’ Over her shoulder she quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘‘Why, thank you, Mr. Farley. How gracious of you.’’

  Farley had been standing in the doorway for a full minute, watching and listening and wondering what kind of woman kept her front door open in the rain while she sat at the piano and ignored a mountain of moving crates that needed unpacking, and the fact that she was stuck with a wreck of a house that needed mucking out and scrubbing down before it was fit for human habitation.