That Camden Summer (31 page)

"I'm a fourth-generation member of this group, and I'm sure my great-grandmother would be appalled if she knew how its once-charitable intention has turned to such high-handed matters as deciding people's fates. I know I'm just one voice against many, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't say something, and what I have to say is primarily about Elfred Spear, not Roberta Jewett.

"Every woman in this yard has conveniently overlooked the fact that Elfred Spear is a shameless debaucher who has pinched bottoms

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and ogled breasts and fondled women he has no right to touch whenever the opportunity arose. He's embarrassed us at public and private gatherings by touching many of us, though few of you will admit it. He mocks his wife while her back is turned, and makes a joke of his marriage with his countless adulteries. He hasn't enough respect for his own children to hold his lechery at bay when they are present, but conducts it right under their noses as if it is his God-given right to insult any female in the universe. We all know he does it - sidles up to women anywhere he pleases and makes sly innuendoes about what's under their skirts. And any of you'll who deny it are outright liars.

"so I ask you, why have you all placed blame on Roberta Jewett when the real villain here is probably Elfred Spear? I've sat quiet while you crucified her simply because she's a woman and divorced, and not one word about Elfred's fornicating has been mentioned. Well, I'm mentioning it because he's gotten away with it long enough. This is our chance to stop Elfred Spear. All we have to do is stand behind Mrs. Jewett, and stop the rumors rather than spread them. Is that so difficult to do? To give the woman the benefit of the doubt? And what is her greatest crime? Is it that she's divorced, or that she's living her life the way many of us wish we could live ours - living where she pleases, driving her own motorcar, supporting her three children as she sees fit, carrying out a job that brings her the satisfaction of earning a salary she can use as she wants without having to ask

a man for pocket money?

"I ask every woman here - are you disdainful of Roberta Jewett or jealous of her?"

As Elizabeth DuMoss stopped speaking the women beneath the elms held so still the buzz of the bees in the hollyhocks could have been cataloged into individual notes. Some faces were red with embarrassment-, others white with rage, but none were impassive. Some women stared beratingly at Elizabeth-, others gazed sheepishly at their laps. Some hid behind their coffee cups, others hid behind their silent self-righteousness.

Elizabeth gathered up her gloves and parasol. "I leave you with a gesture which to some of you may seem excessive-, but which I see as essential to my self-respect. At this time I formally resign my position as treasurer of the Greater Camden Ladies' Tea3 Quilting and Benevolent Society and submit my resignation from the club. I find I cannot be affiliated with an institution that would put its time and efforts - and probably some of its treasury funds as well

- into bringing undeserved emotional duress upon a woman like Mrs. Jewett. In doing this, I follow the dictates not only of my own heart, but of my foremothers as well, one of whom was a founder and charter member of this society. On her behalf, and my own, I bid you good-bye.)5

Elizabeth DuMoss, having said her piece - and said it with magnificent mastery - snapped up her parasol and left the gathering. Before she reached the garden gate, she heard the furor burst forth behind her.

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She went straight to the shop of Gabriel Farley on Bayview Street. Finding him out on a job, she repaired to his home where, receiving no response to her knock on his screen door, she opened it and dropped a note onto his rag rug.

Mr. Farley, it said, I must speak to you immediate] . The Benevolent Society is going y

to try to undermine the reputation of Roberta Jewett and get her children taken away from her. We cannot let that happen. Please call me at 84 or come by my house this evening as soon as you possibly can. Elizabeth DuMoss.

Elizabeth DuMoss was a pretty woman with soft brown eyes, gentle manners and an exceedingly rich husband who owned one of the largest houses in Camden, on Pearl Street, as well as the limestone quarries in Rockport. Elizabeth was one year younger than Gabriel Farley and had been infatuated with him from the time she was in fourth grade. She loved her husband in countless ways and had established a faithful, workable marriage. But he was thick through the middle and tight-fisted with his money, and though she wouldn't have traded her life with anyone's, there were several levels on which she nevertheless envied Roberta Jewett.

Her unrequited first love was one of them. When he rang her bell at six-fifteen that

evening she rose from the dinner table and told the maid, "I'll get it, Rosetta. Please, go on serving dinner." She trod through her home with the grace of a hostess accustomed to handling callers, and approached the front door with the assurance of one who understands her unassailable place at the head of a small-town society.

"Hello, Gabriel," she said, opening the screen door and admitting him into her richly papered foyer.

"Hello, Elizabeth." He extended his hand and she gave hers. "How are you?"

"Oh, I'm fine. At least I was until the Benevolent Society meeting this afternoon." Their handclasp held, and their mutual

knowledge of her longtime regard for him lent the moment an intimacy that was present whenever they met. But along with it came a mutual respect for her married state and the fact that she was the mother of four children.

He dropped her hand and said., "I got your note. "

She held up a finger and said, "One moment, Gabriel." He watched her move down the hall to the dining room archway and speak to her family. "Excuse me, Aloysius, Gabriel is here now. Children, continue with your supper. We won't be long."

A chair scraped back and Aloysius DuMoss brought his considerable girth and walrus moustache into the hall. He was extending a hand as he approached Gabriel and said,

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"Let's step into the morning room where we can talk in private."

What was said among the three of them in the DuMoss's morning room drove Gabriel Farley straight to Roberta's front door within five minutes of his meeting with them.

The girls were on the front porch when he arrived, slung into hammocks and canvas chairs, reading and whisking away mosquitoes with wilted lilac branches. Ethan Ogier was there, too, sitting with his back against a railing spindle, playing catch with himself by throwing a hard rubber ball against the wall beneath the living room window where it left a smudge in Gabriel's white paint job, which no longer looked as immaculate as it had last April.

They all said, "Hi, Mr. Farley," too steeped in laziness to pay him much mind.

"Your mother home?" he asked as he mounted the stairs in two giant steps.

"She's in the kitchen." "Okay if I go right in?"

"Mom!" Susan yelled over her shoulder. "Mr. Farley's coming in!"

He opened the screen door as she returned to her reading.

Roberta met him in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel that looked as gray as the shop rags Gabe used on his tools.

"Well . . . back so soon?" she said. "You come a-courtin'?"

He turned her by an arm and whisked her into the kitchen where they could not be seen

through the doorway.

"If it's courting you demand, you're going to get it, Roberta, because I want to marry you." "Goodness, that's quite a change from this

afternoon when you indicated you really didn't want to marry me, but would if you had to, to save me from disgrace. Now, which one is it-, Gabriel?"

"I swear to God, I never saw such a saucy woman in my life. Would you shut up and listen to me?"

"Shut up ... oh, now that's really poetic. Whoo!" She fanned her face with the dishtowel. "Makes a woman's heart race about forty miles an hour to hear sweet talk like that. Who taught you to - "

Gabe shut her up with a kiss.

He plastered his very impatient mouth over her very impertinent one and flattened her up against the pantry door. When he had her effectively silenced-, he put his arms to use as well. Those long muscular carpenter's arms slid around her and scooped her away from the door against him, and as their bodies aligned, all of her sassiness and all of his exhorting melted into oblivion. She went up on tiptoe and he adjusted his head, and they meshed together splendidly, like some perfect mortise and tenon he might have fashioned to last two hundred years. With an arm at her waist and an open hand in her tumbledown hair, he kept her there where both of them had often imagined her being, kissing the bejesus out of her.

It was fiery and insistent and tinged with

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the awareness that a porchful of young people could come slamming into the house at any moment.

And deuced if they didn't.

Right in the middle of that important first willing resignation, when Roberta was bent back over Gabe's arm and his dusty carpenter's trousers were nestled into the gathers of her wrinkled white nurse's apron, two girls showed up in the doorway. There they were, going at it like long-lost lovers when they heard Susan whisper, "My mom is kissing your dad," then two giggles that brought Gabe's head swinging around as he ordered over his shoulder, "Out, you two!" and belatedly, "Hello, Isobel."

Roberta peeked around Gabe and seconded the order. "Yes, out. And don't come back till we tell you to. "

Gabe resumed his stance and said, "Kids ... sheesh," before Roberta brazenly pulled his head down for more.

Their kisses got better then - the children knew, and would stay away, and the hurdle was jumped at last. They took each other ... and plenty of time ... and explored some while a mosquito came buzzing and was ignored. She sampled his mouth and he sampled hers, and they used their hands on what was allowable. When primal urges became adamant, he pulled his midsection back, flattened his forearms against the door and stood that way, breathing hard against the bridge of her nose. His eyes were closed. So were hers. Their heartbeats were still doing a quickstep and there was a mosquito

bite on Roberta's cheek.

"He got me," she said, smiling. "Who?"

"The mosquito." "Where? I'll kiss it."

"Right here." She tapped her cheek and he kissed it, bending to reach, leaving his forearms on the wall.

"Thank you," she murmured.

"Any more?" he queried. "Here?" He grazed her eyebrow. "Here?" And her nose. "Here?" And her lips.

"MmM ... yes, there."

While he kissed her mouth as if it were a slice of watermelon, she scratched the bite on her cheek. Still preoccupied with his amorous attentions, he pulled her hand away.

"Here, don't do that. It only makes it worse." "Quit talking when you're kissing me. I've been without kissing for too long to put up with that. "

"Boy, you're bossy," he said-, and followed orders.

Some time later they came up for air, and she looped her arms loosely over his shoulders. "Oh. Gabriel," she said, gazing into his eyes, "what took you so long?"

"What do you mean, what took me so long? Do you remember the first time I kissed you? You didn't even kiss me back, just sat there like a lump of dough. It takes a man a while to get up his courage after getting treated like that."

"I did not sit there like a lump of dough." "Yes, you did, Mrs. Jewett, as if you were

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analyzing it. And then you excused me from your house as if to say, 'Duty done, goodbye."'

"I don't remember it that way at all. I just thought it was a bad idea."

He grinned. "Obviously you don't anymore." "No, Mr. Farley, I don't anymore."

"Good, because you've got to listen to me. You've got to marry me because the

She pushed his arm aside as if it were a turnstile.

"No. Listen He caught her and kept her between him and the wall. "You've got to because the Ladies' Benevolent Society is talking about raising issues with the law over your mothering, and they're making noises about trying to force your kids away from you somehow. And it's my fault, don't you see? Because I bashed in Elfred's face, and they figured we were fighting over you so you were probably carrying on with both of us, and somebody saw your car at my house afterwards, and if they go to the authorities you'll have to tell them what Elfred did to you, and I don't think you want to do that. "

She stared at him with her hands pressed to the wall behind her.

"Who told you all this?" "Elizabeth DuMoss." "Shelby's mother?"

"Yes. She belongs to that society. Belonged

- actually, she quit today when they started raising these preposterous issues. Gave 'em a piece of her mind, too. Then she came to see

me and warned me what they were planning to do. "

She stared at him again and said, "My mother is a member of the Benevolent Society."

He closed his eyes and breathed ""Oh, God." She pushed on his arm and he let his hands slip from the wall, releasing her. "I'm sorry, Roberta."

She walked toward the dry sink, turning her back on him. "Why would Elizabeth DuMoss stand up for me?"

"Because she knows what kind of a snake Elfred is. "

She snapped him a look. "You told her what he did to me?"

It took him a beat to answer. "No. not exactly. "

"Then what? ... Exactly.

"I didn't tell her. I think she just guessed from what she heard about me beating him up. Roberta, look" - he moved up close behind her and tried to make her turn around

- "this is all my fault. If I'd have used my head and cornered Elfred out in the country someplace where nobody would have known I was the one to beat him up, this wouldn't have happened. I'm sorry. It was stupid and selfish of me, because all I was thinking about was myself and how angry I was. I never stopped to think about how it would implicate you. Please, Roberta . . . " She had been resisting his effort to turn her around so he slipped an arm across her collarbone and pulled her back against him. "Please don't get that way