The Hearth and Eagle (36 page)

“Melissa Honeywood, wife of Moses Honeywood. Died July 6, 1732, aged 17 years,” and the epitaph.

O Careless youth, as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be
Prepare for Death and follow me.

This had used to frighten Hesper, but now Melissa and the three-day-old baby buried with her intensified the joy of deep, singing life.

I’m through with all of you, she whispered to them. I’m going out, free, away from you, with Evan. The slender gray stones seemed to gather themselves into an acquiescent stillness. The night breeze was rising and blew across Gerry’s Island to the Burial Hill. Hesper stretched tall, leaning against the wind. Across the harbor on the Neck the lighthouse took up its measured blinking. Below her in the town the huddled houses sprang one by one into an amber glow. Two skiffs rowed homeward into Little Harbor, she heard the clinking of the rowlocks and smelled the pungent odor of cod from the fish flakes on shore.

She turned toward the south and straining her eyes in the dusk made out the high-hipped and peaked roof line, the two jutting chimneys of the Hearth and Eagle. Was Evan still inside listening to her father’s ramblings, sparring with her mother? Why didn’t he follow me? she thought. She walked more soberly down the lower slope of the hill and back along Orne Street. As she turned the corner onto Franklin, she saw a very tall figure walking ahead of her.

Mr. Porterman again. Once she would have avoided him, but since his last visit her hostility had vanished. Amos Porterman, and indeed everybody in Marblehead, had receded to shadowy unimportance.

She came up beside him, smiling and saying—“Why, hello—were you coming to call?”

Amos stopped dead, tongue-tied as a boy, at the sudden sight of her, close beside him and smiling and friendly as she had never been.

He nodded, and snatched off his hat, holding it clumsily against his broad chest.

She put her head on one side, looking up at him through her lashes. “I do believe you’re sweet on Ma—calling so often!”

“Hesper!” He gaped at her unbelieving. After a moment he gave a grunt of laughter. “You’re a mighty different girl from what I thought.”

Her smile faded. “I
am
different,” she said. “I’m happy.”

He dropped his lids for a moment, and turned his head away. She began to walk and he kept step with her.

“Are you really going to marry that—going to marry Redlake tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said very low. “You ought to marry a different kind of man—one who’d take care of you—who’d understand you—”

“Fiddle—” she said quickly and flippantly, straining to see through the windows of the Inn—no light upstairs in his room, he must be waiting in the kitchen—“Besides, no kind of man has asked me till Evan.”

Amos drew a sharp breath and stopped again, by the picket fence in the shadow of the horse chestnut tree. He put his hand on her arm.

“There’s one asking you now—Hesper.”

Her head jerked back and her mouth dropped open. “What?” she cried—choking on a hysterical laugh. The light flickered through the leaves onto his big square face, and the flaxen white hair above it, and his eyes were looking down at her with a yearning and bitter sadness.

“Yes, I suppose it’s funny—but I mean it—” he said harshly, and he put his hands behind his back. She shut her mouth and swallowed, sorry that she had hurt him, and still dumbfounded.

“But what about Charity—?” she said, picking the most obvious of the many questions. She was excited and flattered and extremely curious. Underneath there was a beat of triumph. She’d tell Evan—no one else, that wouldn’t be kind—but Evan—he’d see—not come to him valueless....

“I can’t marry Charity,” said Amos. “I’ve known that quite a while.” He did not want to think of Charity—the increasing boredom, shame that he’d let her dangle so long—

“I love you—” he said with difficulty, twisting his hat in his hand like any gawky yokel, feeling like a fool. “I don’t wonder you laughed. I guess I didn’t know it myself—until—” Until when? The night she’d come in sparkling with that Redlake ? The night he’d met them on the wharf? but it seemed to him now he’d always loved her.

“I didn’t really laugh—Mr. Porterman,” she said gently, “it’s just I was so surprised, I never thought of you that—”

“Oh, I know,” he interrupted—“You never liked me even.” He put his hand on the gate and pushed it open for her. “Don’t look so worried. I know unwanted love’s a damn nuisance. Forget it, Hesper. I didn’t mean to speak.”

She gave him an uncertain apologetic smile. The scene, the sudden shift of relationship, seemed to her unreal. Impossible to believe in Mr. Porterman as a lover—or in anyone but Evan. At the thought of him a dark and tender fire ran through her veins, she walked quickly through the gate and up the path to the kitchen door. Amos followed because he couldn’t help himself. Only a few more minutes. Tomorrow she’d be gone.

There was nobody in the kitchen except Susan, who stood at the table stirring the bride cake in a huge wooden bowl.

Hesper said, “Here’s Mr. Porterman—” in a thickened voice, and waited until her mother had greeted him, then she edged up close to Susan and said very low—“Where’s Evan?”

Susan compressed her lips, glancing toward the visitor. She beat at the cake with vicious stabs, but pity for her daughter subdued the sharpness of her answer. “He’s gone up to his room, and locked himself in with a bottle of my best Medford rum.”

The girl winced, the faint rose whipped by the breeze and Amos’s startling proposal drained from her cheeks. Her eyes slid unseeing over her mother and Amos, who turned and looked out of the window pretending that he had not heard. She moved across the boards to the stair door. “I guess I’ll go to bed too—” she said. “It’s sensible. We’ve a long journey tomorrow.” The door shut behind her.

Amos and Susan heard the slow ascending footsteps as the stairs creaked. Their eyes met for a moment, and Susan saw plain the meaning of his expression. So that’s how it is, she thought—that poor fool girl, but she’s made her bed now, she’ll have to lie in it. She poured another cupful of floured raisins into the bride cake, moistened the batter with rum.

There was a moment’s silence in the old kitchen, filled by the banjo clock’s unhurried tick, then Amos rushed into speech. “I stopped by to leave a wedding gift for the bride. Nothing fancy, though it might be useful.” He fished a bundle from his pocket and put it on the table beside the mixing bowl. He ripped open the wrapping to disclose a pair of thin sateen slippers, and a pair of black kid button shoes.

“That’s mortal kind of you, Mr. Porterman. She needs ’em.”

“I think they’ll fit her—” he said tonelessly. “I’m a pretty good judge of size.”

“You’re a good judge of everything.” She tilted the bowl. The muscles in her stout forearm lumped as she beat the heavy batter.

“Well—good-bye,” said Amos, moving past the table toward the door. “I hope she’ll—she’ll be happy.”

“Happy,” repeated Susan with contempt. “A woman can do without happiness. But she can’t get along without two other things. Not a woman like Hes. She must have self-respect, and she must belong somewheres.”

Amos gave a tired sigh—entirely unconscious, nor had he any idea how well Susan understood him, until she looked up from the bowl, with sympathy plain in her eyes. She shook her head, and hunched her shoulders. “I’m right sorry—Mr. Porterman,” she said. “There’s naught so blind as a desiring woman.” She went to the oak dresser to find the big cake tin, while Amos flushed and muttered something. He went out to walk heavily back to the Marblehead Hotel.

H
ESPER AND EVAN
spent their wedding night in Boston at the Parker House. The brief wedding itself, the hurried farewells, the strangeness of the train trip to Boston, the incredible bustle and noise of the city, the magnificence of the hotel lobby, and then the first sight of their cheap attic room—all these were blurred for Hesper by nervous excitement. It sustained her on the surface of the crowding new impressions, and enabled her to minimize Evan’s attitude.

He was, throughout the wedding day, charming and detached. He made no reference to his disappearance the night before, nor did he show any overt effects from the bottle of rum which Susan had found empty on his dresser. During the services he gave his responses promptly and rather in the manner of an adult reciting nursery rhymes for children.

On the train this had also been his attitude as he pointed out to Hesper the sights along the way.

When the disdainful bellboy had shut the door on them in their hotel bedroom, Hesper looked at the sticky yellow varnished door, the single hissing gas jet, the lumpy brass bed and her excitement left her, to be replaced by a dreary dismay.

What am I doing here so far from home with this man who is a stranger? she thought, thus echoing the initial honeymoon panic of most brides through the ages.

Evan lowered the gas jet and sat down on the bed. “This room is ugly and smells abominable,” he said. “Sorry I can’t afford a better one.” But he said it without much interest.

“It’s all right,” she answered, not looking at him.

He leaned back against the knobbly brass head rails and crossed his legs. “Take your bonnet off, Hesper, so I can see your hair. Take that hideous dress off too, for that matter. We’re married now and it’s quite proper.”

She looked at him then. The narrow dark face, the heavy-lidded eyes, the full mouth with its ironic half-smile. He wasn’t like this at Castle Rock.

She turned quickly away. She took off her bonnet, a dish-shaped yellow chip straw bought by Susan at Miss Hattie’s little shop near the Town House. It was trimmed with buff ribbons to match the heavy brown moire dress hastily run up from a length Susan had been saving for years in the lumber room.

Hesper hung the bonnet on a wooden knob behind the door and sat down on the slippery mohair chair by the only window. She held herself tight, staring through the dusty window out over the city. It was hot here under the roof. Two flies buzzed around her head and, wheeling, settled on the cracked marble washstand.

Evan looked at her profile against the window. The straight nose and firm chin overbalanced at the nape of her neck by the waterfall of bunched red hair. He looked at the brown dress buttoned up to her throat, bunched at the sleeves and bunched out by horsehair over the hips. It encased and distorted her like a coat of armor, and the color of the dress—of swampwood, of imitation walnut—threw muddy light onto her white skin.

He looked more intently, savoring his revulsion, using it as a shield against her who would come too close, and he saw tears shining on her cheek.

He shot out his breath in mingled annoyance and contrition. “Good God, my dear—don’t cry.” He knelt down beside her chair and began to kiss her. At first she would not respond, but he was patient and gentle. He unloosened her hair. His deft fingers unbuttoned her collai and removed the disfiguring dress. Gradually, as the sense of her beauty returned to him, he made love to her with compelling passion and she followed him blindly into the timeless moments where there is no space for doubt.

For three weeks Evan was a fervent and intuitive lover. The days and the nights to Hesper swam together. Outer discomforts, though many, became negligible or even interesting, infused as each was with the spirit of shared adventure. The day after the wedding they took the cars to New York, a day-long trip of racketing wheels, glaring heat, and soot from the engine stack.

In the city they went to Evan’s old room in the boarding-house; then Evan rented a skylighted loft on Fourth Street near Broadway, paid two months rent in advance, and spent the remainder of his capital for a few pieces of second-hand furniture.

They set up the bedstead, and the washstand, hung a curtain across the sleeping corner of the loft, stacked canvases and easel in the other corner, placed a table, two chairs, and a cupboard near the rusty little wood-burning stove, and left the rest of the moving in for later, intent only on their physical concentration with each other.

When they became hungry they went to a small German saloon on the Bowery where for a few pennies they found beer, sausage, and strong rye bread. In the evenings they wandered around the city, down Broadway to the Battery to sit and feed the pigeons near the cylindrical bulk of Castle Garden, or up Fifth Avenue to Central Park, where they sat on a rustic bench near the Mall.

They talked very little. Hesper tried once or twice to speak to him about his painting, and always he eluded her, cutting through her tentative questions with the weapon of physical contact, pulling her close to him, his hand on her breast while her swift-answering blood pounded, and she forgot her question. She had his whole mind and attention during those three weeks, and she glowed into a new loveliness. Evan had bought her a green silk dress, a bargain from Stewart’s basement, marked down because the style was dated. Evan made her wear it without the crinoline. Neither of them cared that it was unfashionable, since the delicate moss green was extremely becoming.

The first time she had worn the dress she had posed proudly against the baize curtain, arms outstretched. The clinging silk made her slender as a fern, and her hair was loose as he liked it, streaming in red-gold strands down her shoulders.

“Ah, Hesper—” he said, half whimsically—“you’re like a fountain of fire on a jasper column.”

“Am I, darling—” she whispered, throwing her arms around his neck—“Don’t you want to paint me like this, then? Don’t you?”

“Someday,” he said lightly, kissing her.

She persisted, baffled again by his withdrawal. For what else had first brought them together except his wish to paint her? “Or—the other way. Without my clothes, if you never let anyone see it.” Color ran up her face, and yet it was amazing how soon she had become accustomed to nakedness, when at first she had been miserably self-conscious.

“You’re very nice, either way—my Marblehead beauty,” said Evan and she heard again an echo of the ironic detachment which he had used on their wedding day.