The Seasons Hereafter (15 page)

In the store she had to wait until Mark finished telephoning an order for trap stock and nylon twine. The only other Bennett there was Charles, who didn't share the family compulsion to make conversation. Feeling amiable and relaxed, she listened to the thud and slosh of water under the floor, and decided to give Barry one of his favorite suppers tonight; fritters, bacon, and applesauce.

She was almost back to the house before she realized that her side of the harbor looked strange; something was either out of place or intruding. A boat lay where there had been none before—
White Lady
, using the empty mooring that lay beyond Barry's and Willy's smaller boats. She looked as big as a yacht. Van was unreasonably excited to see her there, as if there must be some profoundly significant reason for it. She walked faster, not able to shake the conviction that she was on her way to a meeting with him, though she kept telling herself there was no sense to it and that she was behaving like a love-sick fifteen-year-old.

When she passed Terence Campion's, Kathy came out on the porch. “Hi! I've got one popped out with chicken pox and two to go. They're miserable, poor peanuts.”

“What's that doing here?” Van gestured toward
White Lady
.

“Schoolhouse Cove's a mess in a storm like this, so he always brings her around to the harbor.”

“Oh. I'm sorry about the kids,” she added. “Anything I can do?”

“Just pray for them to break out tonight. So long!” She went back inside. Van felt cheated and forlorn. So it was nothing out of the ordinary after all. But still, if she hadn't stood there being so damned sweet to the Dinsmores and if she hadn't had to wait in the store, she would have seen him when he rowed ashore from the mooring; there was the strange skiff tied up next to Barry's in the lee of the wharf. He might have come into the house, saying he wanted to check on the knitting, using that for an excuse. And she hadn't been there. . . . She was dreadfully tired.

B
arry brought a lamp into her room and woke her. She surfaced out of a hot, muffling blackness and put her arms over her eyes. “Go away,” she said. There were curious sounds in the room with him, rattlings and thumpings. “What's that?” she asked thickly from under her folded arms.

“It's the storm. It's backlashed, coming north now, straight into the harbor like all hell's broke loose. Come on, get up.”

“What for? The house washing away?”

“They're coming to watch the boats from here. In case one starts ashore.” He tried to pull her arms away from her head, half-laughing, half-exasperated. “Get up, will ye? Make us up a big pot of coffee and some sandwiches. It's only nine o'clock. Owen's coming down and Willy's bringing Gina with him, if they don't get blowed away coming around the harbor. She's scairt to stay alone.”

“Over here?” She sat up and glared at him. “What'd you have to invite her for? Why can't they go and watch at Campions'? Terence has to keep an eye out for his boat, doesn't he?”

“For Christ's sake, they got three sick kids over there, Now are you getting up and acting like a normal human being, or aren't you?”

“You mean I've got a choice?”

The lamp threw his shadow over the slanting ceiling with an impressiveness he never had. “Come on. You don't have to talk to her, you can work on those trapheads. But if you don't come down it'll look funny.”

“Say I'm getting the chicken pox too. No, bubonic plague.” Ignoring that remark he said excitedly, “Owen ought to be showing up pretty soon. That boat of his is doing some fancy larruping around on her mooring, and she's some heavy son of a bitch. If she comes down on me and Willy, that's it, period. We're likely all three to come ashore and break up.”

“What good does it do to watch?” Seal Point's harbor had been almost completely sheltered and a man could get to his boat very easily in any kind of storm. What did Barry think they could do in this gale?

“We've got a big seine dory with an outboard tied up alongside the wharf here. When you see a boat coming ashore or moving down on another one, the thing is to get a man aboard her to start up the engine and get her on the lee side of a wharf. If the engine starts, that is,” he added jauntily. He ran downstairs whistling. Barry never became gloomy or apprehensive about an emergency with boats and salt water; it was the one field in which she could quite objectively admire him.

She sat there a moment looking at the dark doorway, listening to him downstairs. A new gust shook the house and rain beat like hail against the windows. The lamplight flickered and Barry's whistle was drowned out. Then she remembered that Owen was coming, and she was frightened. She didn't know how she could sit in the same room with him and Barry. The cove would be there in the room with them. Everything. She touched the back of her neck, trying to remember if it was the maimed hand that had taken hold of her there.

Finally she got up and into fresh slacks and a clean blouse, brushing her hair but not bothering with lipstick. When she went downstairs Barry was in the darkened sun parlor, flashing his five-cell torch out at the moorings. She measured coffee into a pot and added water. He came out into the kitchen grinning as if it were the start of a party. “Somebody's buglight on the way. Must be Willy and his child bride.”

Gina, shucked out of boots and red rain clothes, wore another of her immense sweaters, lavender this time, with violet stretch pants. For once her hair was out of rollers. She gave Barry a languorous smile and Van an indifferent nod, then sat down at the table and laid out the contents of her handbag. She began to groom herself with the concentration, but not the tidy charm, of a cat. Vanessa, disliking hairbrushes on the table, watched coldly sidewise as she made sandwiches at the dresser. Willy, flushed with happy embarrassment under his acne, talked loudly with Barry about the storm and lobstering. Barry took on a mellow twinkle and called him “son” quite often, though they might have been only ten years apart in age.

Gina's black hair was pushed with the brush into a different kind of tangle from the one she'd come in with; eyelashes were minutely scrutinized, and the long black lines drawn under the eyes were refreshed, the green iridescence on the lids renewed. Two lipsticks were used in a process which for Van had a certain repulsive fascination; they left Gina's mouth much larger than life, so dark and thickly glistening she wondered how the girl could move her mouth to speak. After that powder was fluffed vigorously over the whole ensemble, also dusting the table, which Gina wiped off with a swipe of her arm. She picked up a small gold-colored vial, squeezed it, and scented herself heavily with a fragrance that reminded Van of rotting hyacinths. Everything done, she packed away her equipment, took out her cigarettes, and with a manner ineffably languid and cynical, lit a cigarette and sat gazing into space. If Barry glanced at her, a large smile flashed on with mechanical brightness, and a kind of twitch ran through her body as if by automatic impulse; it happened so often in just the same way, beginning with a toss of the head, a switch of the shoulders, a wriggle of her skinny seat, that each time Van was fascinated all over again. If Willy looked at her, which he did often, and said, “You all right, honey?” she sagged instantly into boredom.

Van suppressed for the time being the desire to scrub the table with hot suds. She sat down across from Gina and began to fill needles with nylon twine. “Have you ever been through a bad storm like this before? Out here, I mean?” she asked. There was the hike of a shoulder toward one ear, a lift of an eyebrow, smoke blown professionally from the nostrils.

“Oh, yeah,” Gina said in-differently. “But nothing ever happens.”

“Well, that's a help.” What would Gina look like, scrubbed?

“Would be a help if that goddam boat really did come ashore and smash up.”

“Listen to her!” Willy erupted in a bray of nervous laughter. “She's got a sense of humor,” he assured Van, but she saw the expression in his eyes. You young fool, she thought, you're Barry all over again, though I wasn't the rotten little trollop you've got.

Gina went on in a dead voice, touching the elaborate mass of hair with pearl-painted nails. “I'd like to see every boat in this harbor smash up tonight. We'd be off here tomorrow with me dancing a jig.”

“Kind of hard on the rest of us, aren't you, dear?” Barry asked her. “Some of us like it. Some of us got a living to make, including your husband.”

“
Him
.” She slanted Willy a glance that turned him dark red, and he forgot to try for a laugh but looked abjectly at his feet. “He could do something else besides being a—” She flickered her thick lashes, and almost smiled. “He could maybe get on a dragger and make damn good pay.”

“What would you do, darlin' mine, while he was on a trip?” Barry teased her. Willy's hand lifted from his knee in a small futile gesture of protest.

“Oh, I'd make out,” she assured Barry. “I could get a job too. I could wait on tables anywhere.”

Not quite anywhere, Vap thought. Aloud she said, “If you hate it here so much why don't you go ashore and work anyway?”

The sound might have been a laugh, but looking at the unchanged face one couldn't be sure. Gina blew out more smoke and her eyes became glazed; her mouth dragged down into an expression of sulky idiocy.

“She wouldn't want to live apart from me, Mrs. Barton,” Willy explained earnestly. “We married to be together, and even if she don't think much of it, being a city girl, she knows this is where I can make a hell of a good living.”

“He makes a hell of a good arse-wiper, too,” said Gina. Barry laughed very loudly and thwacked Willy on the shoulder. The boy smiled feebly. Vanessa decided to scrub the table and then to go back to bed.

“Hey let's set a game going here,” said Barry, jumping up. “Hey, Van, where's the cards? We've got some, haven't we?”

“In the table drawer,” said Van.

The door to the entry swung open and Owen stood there, needing room to get out of his streaming oilclothes. His face was red with rain and wind.

“Hey, Cap'n Owen, you're drowning us!” Willy protested as a wet sleeve swung past him.

“You're likely to be wetter than that before the night's out. Hello, sweetheart. How's the poor man's Cleopatra?”

Gina giggled. “I haven't found Mark Antony yet.”

“Everything's all secure out front so far, Admiral,” said Barry.

“You're just in time for some of the best coffee you ever doused a lip in.”

“Here, we can liven it up a dite.” Owen set a fifth of whiskey on the table in front of Gina, who giggled again.

“Oh, boy, this'll be the best storm-watching
I
ever did!”

“Gina likes to pretend she's tough and drinks a lot,” Willy explained. “She don't really touch it, hardly.”

Gina made a raucous sound, and Barry laughed obligingly.

“You pouring, Admiral?” he asked Owen.

“You can do the honors.” Owen sat down at the table and began shuffling the cards. They flowed and snapped through his hands so that the missing fingers were not missed, and Willy said in admiration, “Gorry, anybody'd think you used to work in one of them big gambling houses.”

“They keep writing to me all the time from Vegas,” said Owen.

“Let's see, Gina, Willy says you get just a sniff.” Barry gave her a twinkling smile, and she whooped.

“Willy says! Who cares what Willy says? I want a glow, and when you gotta glow you gotta glow.” She rocked with laughter. Barry poured out half a cheese-glass full. Willy, smiling desperately, said, “Make it last, honey. . . . Tastes better if you sip it real slow, don't it, Barry?”

“I wouldn't know.” Barry splashed liquor into another glass. “I'm a gulper myself. Here you be, Willy. Drink her down and join the human race.”

Owen went on laying out a game of solitaire. Van stood at one side. She had never felt quite as invisible in her own home, or whatever shelter passed for her own home. She had always been in control. Tonight she was here but not here. Owen hadn't given her even a glance. Gina was blossoming nastily in the presence of the men, and Willy was so concentrated on her that Van wondered why the others couldn't feel the agony of that concentration. Barry had got drunk with the occasion even before the whiskey had been poured. From now on he would become progressively profane and salacious. He might be sorry for Willy, but that wouldn't keep him from entering into a duel of juvenile double-meanings with Gina. He was too stupid to realize that Owen was already bored with them all.

Is it insane to hide in a book from
this
? she thought. If she could move quietly now toward the stairs, they'd never miss her. But as she turned her head hungrily toward the dark corner Barry slammed down his glass and shouted, “Hey, how about getting the grub out? We're about to have us a little poker game. I'm leaving it to Gina to decide whether it'll be draw, stud, or strip.”

“When I've had a few more drinks I won't care,” said Gina.

“Gorry, here!” He tipped more into her glass. Willy got up, almost knocking over his chair.

“I'll take a look at the boats,” he mumbled and went into the other room, cracking one elbow against a door casing on the way. Gina leaned her head against Barry's arm. Her giggle had now become a gurgle.

“Say when,” Barry commanded, and she breathed, “Any time.”

“Don't you know I never tamper with married women?”

“Think of all that experience lost to the world.” Gina rubbed her face along his sleeve. All that goddam makeup wiping off, Vanessa thought, and me washing by hand.

“Ayuh, ain't it fierce?” said Barry. “But I don't mind you working on me. You might just weaken my good resolutions.”