High Tide at Noon (14 page)

It seemed like a year, the time when she stood by the window, watching them come up the path through the meadow whose grasses were still beaten down by the wind. Philip came out from the sitting room and knocked his pipe against the stove. Owen came yawning downstairs in his stocking feet, his black hair tumbled, his brown cheeks flushed with sleep, and she heard him say to Donna, “How about a mug-up? Coffee and stuff.”

“Do you ever stop eating, Owen?” his mother asked.

Joanna turned around. She was surprised by her intense calm. “Here's Charles,” she said. “With Mateel Trudeau.”

Donna, eager as a young girl, said, “Charles, back so soon?”

“With Mateel.” Philip said it. His face took on a curious stillness. Owen went quickly to the window, his grin delighted.

“By God, she's pretty! What's she coming up here for?”

“We'll know in a minute,” said Joanna with the same detached serenity, and went to open the front door.

Charles' lips smiled when he saw her, but not his eyes, and she knew he had steeled himself. Mateel huddled close against him, trying to hide her terror.

“ 'Allo, Jo,” she said huskily.

Joanna was brisk. “Come in quick, you must be frozen.”

“Got anything hot to drink?” Charles asked. He half-lifted Mateel into the hall. Perhaps to show her defiant courage she had used lipstick with a lavish, and unsteady, hand. It was garish against her pallor. Joanna would have wiped it off if she could, but it was too late now, with Donna on her way through the sitting room and the other boys behind her. Stephen was out in the shop.

Donna never looked more regal than she did at the moment she appeared in the doorway. “Hello, Charles,” she said quietly. “And Mateel. How do you do, my dear?”

Charles answered quickly and harshly, “Mother, I'm married. This is my wife.”

“Married?”
The faint color drained from Donna's face. Behind her, Philip and Owen were motionless. “Your wife,” Donna said slowly.

“I know it's a surprise, Mother.” Charles seemed to forget the others standing there in the bare, chill hall. His eager smile flashed at Donna. “Mother, I know it's a shock, but you know me—I like to do things without talking about them. And a man has to get married sometime. I'm twenty-six.”

“Come into the sitting room where it's warm,” Donna said. “Mateel looks cold.” She put her hand on the girl's arm and smiled into her bewildered eyes. Joanna applauded silently, knowing the effort behind the gesture. They went into the next room and Charles put his arm tightly around Mateel.

“This is the one I wanted. So I married her.”

“Joanna, why don't you make some coffee? Mateel, sit down, child.” She herself sat down, and Joanna felt a twinge of fear. Was Charles so stupid as to think his mother wasn't upset, because she was so calm? The grim lines around his mouth had relaxed, he was smiling as he looked at his brothers.

“Well, isn't anybody going to welcome the bride?”

“Sure, me!” said Owen with enthusiasm. He leaned over and kissed Mateel's trembling mouth. “I'm happy as a clam at high water.” She smiled at him uncertainly, and then Philip repeated the gesture. Donna sat very still, her hands folded in her lap, and Charles turned toward her swiftly.

“Mateel was scared sick all the way out,” he said, his words sharp-edged. “Scared of you, Mother. And Father. I told her she was crazy. As if you'd hurt her!” His laughter was a harsh sound. “I told her you'd be glad to marry me off to a girl like her.”

Mateel leaned against his arm, biting her lip, her eyes bright with tears. And Donna said in her composed voice, “Just let me get my breath, Charles.”

With a sense of escape, Joanna turned toward the kitchen to make the coffee, and met her father in the doorway. How long he had been standing there, she didn't know. But his face was like dark iron. Almost at the same instant the others saw him, and the silence in the room was a heavy thing.

Stephen came forward into the room and looked at Charles. “So you're married,” he said quietly. “Did you have to go off and do it like this? Was there any reason why you couldn't come and tell me what you were going to do?”

“I thought it was best this way,” said Charles. His face drew into hard, impassive lines; the eyes that looked back at his father were as locked and shuttered as Stephen's own. Both of them hiding, Joanna thought, and suddenly she remembered who had told Charles not to tell their father. Herself . . . She started forward in her chair, and it was then that Mateel found her voice.

Perhaps she was heartened by Donna's gentleness and the boys' welcome. Perhaps she wanted to make things clear to Charles' father, and there was no way to tell her to be silent. Her words tumbled out, shyly and huskily.

“We didn't want to surprise you like dat. Running away. We wanted to tell you and my fadder, and be engaged—wit' a ring, you know.” Her little smile was eager and apologetic. “We wanted a real wedding, but we couldn't do it dat way after all. We—it was better, not to wait.”

There was no mistaking the truth. Mateel hadn't meant to tell it; no one could possibly want to tell it. But it had slipped out in her eagerness to please Charles' family; to show this man with the stony dark face that Charles hadn't meant to sneak off and do this thing without telling him. Oh, Charles had told her lots of times what friends he and his father were, that no matter what the trouble was, he could always have a fair show from him. But it hadn't helped at all, for Charles was red from collar to hairline under his brown skin, and she felt the twitching of the muscles in the arm around her shoulders.

Donna's face held a frozen composure. Stephen said softly, “So that's how it is. So that's how my oldest son got himself a wife.”

He turned and walked out of the room. Mateel began to cry. “I shouldn't 'ave let you marry me! I knew 'ow it would be!”

Charles laid his big brown hand gently across her mouth, and hugged her close to him. Over her curly head he looked at his mother, his sister, his two younger brothers. His eyes, narrow and black above the red-tinged cheekbones, defied them; he looked as if he would never smile again.

He's chosen his woman, thought Joanna, and to hell with the rest of us! She felt a curious pride in him ; he was so thoroughly Bennett.

“We'll go now,” he said.

No one went to the window to watch Charles walk down across the meadow with his wife. They stood about the room like awkwardly placed actors in a bad play. The couch in the corner where Charles liked to sprawl, reading, his ashtray on his chest; the model of the
Aurora B
. on the mantel, made by his knife—they were suddenly predominant in the room. With his going, the house seemed all at once full of him.

Owen, who hated silence, moved a chair with a jarring scrape. “Christ, I'm getting out of this morgue!” He strode toward the kitchen. Philip paused for a moment, then went to Donna and gave her arm a little squeeze.

“Buck up, Mother. Things'll iron out.” Her blue eyes answered him gallantly.

When Philip had gone out, Joanna sat down on a hassock by her mother's knees, as she had done when she was a small girl.

“Mother,” she said with difficulty. “It was my fault Charles didn't tell you and Father. He asked me if he ought to, and I told him to wait.”

“Don't feel so bad about it, Joanna. It doesn't make any difference.”

“I don't like this any more than you do, Mother. But there's one thing—Mateel' s not a bad girl.”

“I never heard that she was.” Donna looked over Joanna's head at the white line where surf broke on distant ledges. It was more than Joanna could stand, this icy composure. The silence bore heavily down on her. She said, “I'd better go out in the shop and tell Father. About what I told Charles, I mean.”

In the shop her father worked methodically on his new traps. She watched him for a few minutes in silence; so many taps with the hammer to drive a nail into place, so many nails to a lath, so many laths to be nailed to the bows; and above them, Stephen's absorbed eyes like black granite, and a white line around his mouth, as there had been around Charles' mouth.

“Hello, Joanna,” he said without looking up.

She was suddenly a little girl again, hands clenched in overall pockets, confessing it was she who had let the skiff go adrift. Jaw tight, mouth stiff, eyes unfaltering, take a long breath . . . “Father, Charles would have told you about him and Mateel, only I told him it would be better to wait.”

He glanced up swiftly. “Well, don't look so stern about it.”

“Don't you see?” she demanded violently. “It wasn't that he didn't
want
to tell you—”

“He was afraid to tell me, Joanna,” Stephen said. “What you said doesn't make any difference. If he'd wanted to come to me, you couldn't have kept him away.” He swung his pipe. “He was afraid to tell me, because he knew how I felt about the Trudeaus, and he remembered what I told him and the other boys.” The white line came again around his mouth.

“But if he
had
come and told me, I might have got riled up because he went against my word, but I'd have respected his honesty and the fact that he'd taken a stand and intended to hold to it.”

The match flame flared briefly in the bowl of the pipe, and reflected in Stephen Bennett's eyes. “But he was afraid to come,” he repeated, and the word
afraid
was not a pleasant one. “Where's your mother? Is she alone?”

Joanna nodded, and he left her. After a few minutes she went back into the kitchen and took the inevitable potatoes out of the bin, and began to peel them. Her parents were talking in the sitting room, and lost in her own thoughts she didn't notice at first that her mother's voice had risen above its usual level pitch, until she could ignore it no longer.

“Stephen, I've never interfered with you. I've never questioned your authority over the boys. But the way you were today—” She took a long breath. “Stephen, you were
hard
.”

“I wasn't hard. I was just. What was I to say to him, in God's name, Donna? He's disgraced us, as well as himself. You realize that, don't you?”

“Oh, yes, it's a disgrace, but it could be even worse, Stephen.” She was almost pleading now. “She doesn't seem like a bad girl. Oh, there was the lipstick, but that doesn't mean anything. Joanna wears it sometimes.”

“Don't mention Joanna's name with hers,” he said shortly. “The Trudeaus are trash, they'll always be trash. It wasn't enough for Charles to run around with the girl behind our backs, he had to get her into trouble. That does it, Donna. That's the whole thing—you can't get past it.”

Donna's voice cooled and steadied. “Stephen, I don't like this marriage any more than you do. I felt like dying inside when I found out he had to marry the girl. Do you think it's going to be easy for me, to remember over and over what's happened? But it doesn't mean that Charles is no good, or that he's ruined himself and forgotten all you ever taught him!”

Stephen's feet paced endlessly back and forth. Joanna peeled potatoes with quick tense motions and listened.

“There's something else, Donna,” his tired voice came after a pause. “I never thought I had to do what Gunnar does with Karl's boys, whip them into line with a horsewhip. I was positive our boys had something in them we could trust. Oh, I knew they'd raise a certain amount of hell, but so did I when I was their age. But all the time I knew what I wanted. I wanted something to be proud of, nothing that was second-rate. I raised hell, but I knew where to draw the line.”

His pacing stopped, and the old couch springs creaked under his weight. “Well, my dear, I made the mistake of thinking our boys had the same idea—the same thing to keep them straight. But Charles didn't care what he got, and if it was that easy for him to get the girl into trouble, you can see what's before him.”

It was more pain than anger with Stephen, Joanna could see it as well as her mother could. There'd been twenty-six years of plans for Charles, and now Charles was tied fast to the Trudeaus; to Stephen it meant the twenty-six years had gone for nothing.

“Stephen, we shouldn't have let him go away. We should have kept him here. Why didn't you tell him they could stay?” Donna asked.

“He's got to work out his own salvation,” Stephen said heavily. “If he's weak, he'll go all the way to hell. And it's time we found out. If he's half the man I raised him to be, we'll find that out too. See what he does with this rotten mess he's made for himself.” Joanna's knife paused; even in the kitchen she heard his sigh, and knew how he dropped his dark head into his hands. Her eyes burned with tears.

“If Charles could go bad,” Stephen said, “God only knows what the others'll turn out to be, what kind of trouble they'll bring home to us next. Donna, I wish to God we'd never had a child!”

“Hush! Don't say that, Stephen!” Donna cried, and for the first time her voice broke. “Charles isn't bad, or weak, either. None of them are! Don't wish them away, Stephen. Some day they'll all be gone, and you'll wish them back again, trouble or not!”

Her quick light steps crossed the room, and Joanna knew Donna was going to her husband, It was a strange thing to listen thus to her parents when they thought they were alone. She had no right to be here; their moments together belonged only to them. But she was glad she had listened, and found how they thought and felt.

Now she wanted to get out. The walls were suddenly too close and thick, but outside the wind was blowing, the sea was loud on the rocks, and the gulls screaming overhead, and she would feel the Island all around her.

She poured water on the potatoes and put them on the stove, took down her trench coat from its hook. Those two in the other room didn't need her now.