The Seasons Hereafter (18 page)

His face twisted in distaste. “That's nothing to quote on a day like this. If you ever had a kid, you'd know better . . .” He stopped short. “I shouldn't have said that. Maybe you do know something about it. I don't know anything about you, you could have been born the day you stepped onto this island as far as I'm concerned.”

She arranged bleached sea-urchin shells and blue mussels meticulously on the sparse grass. “I never had a child and I was never pregnant. And I never wanted a child. That verse used to make me cry for a while. I had a kitten in one place I lived, and something happened to it. I found it dead. So when I came across that verse I never thought of human babies, only kittens.”

“You could have had other kittens afterwards, couldn't you?”

She shook her head.

“I'll bring you one,” he offered. “Holly's cat's got a family. Holly'd be tickled for you to have one.”

“There could never be any kitten but that one,” she said without expression. “There never will be.” It was not strictly true. There had been that kitten, which she had never remembered aloud to anyone and hardly ever to herself, but she would not object to a kitten now; only she didn't want one from his house—it was bad enough to have to accept the lilies of the valley.

“And you and Barry never wanted young ones,” he went on.

“Barry did.” She gave him a brief smile and then returned to her shells again.

“You afraid to have one? Narrow women have it hard, sometimes.”

It was odd that he knew now her narrowness. Her mind wavered into a dark, gold-shot sweetness, then came back to the day and the doomed strawberry blossoms, the weight of the hidden sun on her bare arms. “No, I wasn't afraid,” she said. As if he knew she didn't want to talk about Barry here, he rolled over onto his back and lay quiet with his eyes shut. From where she sat she could see his lashes clearly against the red-brown ridges of his cheekbones, and his nose seemed to jut out larger than she'd noticed before. The gray was sprinkled through his hair like very fine silver wires. He was a big man, lying there, arms sprawled, one knee drawn up, the other leg flung wide. He crowded her clearing with its miniature treasure of shells, spruce seedlings, and strawberry blossoms, like Gulliver. As she watched, he brought one forearm up before his face and looked at his watch, then dropped the arm again.

“When does school get out?” she asked him.

“Not yet.”

She took that contentedly; she was not yet greedy of the time with him and didn't expect to be. This meeting today was like the one at the dance—fated, yet accidental. Walking along the high barrier ridge of Long Cove, she had not known that he was working at home today instead of visiting among the harbor fishhouses; he had gone up to the house from his workshop in Schoolhouse Cove to get some coffee just at the moment when the mist cleared enough to show her solitary figure moving against a lilac-blue band of fog. A fresh wave of it blowing across from open sea blotted her out again, but he had already set out from the house to find her.

“Oh—hello,” she had said offishly when he confronted her. And he had said, as if accusing her of trespassing, “Do you come here often?”

Now he said, “Any of your folks still living?”

“No.”

“Tough.”

“Why? Do you think that everyone who isn't part of a clan is unlucky?”

“You trying to pick a fight with me? . . . Was your father a lobster-man?” The maimed hand lay on the grass, a two-inch spruce stood in the curve of his thumb. She wanted so much to take his hand that she had to press back against the tree trunk and gaze sternly at the sky as she answered him.

“No, he was a soldier. Infantry,” she invented. “He made a career of it. He was killed in an accident in the war games in Louisiana one year. That finished my mother off. She was delicate to begin with.” She saw them taking flesh before her eyes with each word she said. First Sergeant, her father, rather like Burt Lancaster in
From Here to Eternity
. “My mother's lungs were never good,” she went on. “She should never have had me. They warned her about childbirth.” She saw the mother, slender, sadly smiling at the little girl she had risked her life for.
The blessed damozel leaned out / From the gold bar of Heaven
.

Owen turned his head on the grass to look toward her.

“I'm sorry as hell,” he said gruffly. “Sorry for them, sorry for you. You must have had it damned lonely.” Her pride of invention gave way to chagrin; she felt squeamish and prickly. His compassion was real, but she had taken him in, and she wished he had known from the first that she was lying and had called her a liar. It was all she could do to keep from getting up and running away, but that would make her look crazy.

“But it explains something,” he was saying, and she said quickly,

“What?”

“You marrying Barry. I've never been able to figure it out. But if you were left alone, it must have been plain hell.” He sat up and lit a cigarette. “Barry's a decent chap. He's friendly, willing, hardworking. But he's not your type. You're like an osprey married to a robin. And you know it. You've been beating your wings against the walls of that birdhouse ever since. It's just God's wonder you haven't beaten him to death in the process.”

“What about you?” she jeered at him. “What's your excuse? Lonely, with all your brothers and your sister and your in-laws? Or did you think you ought to choose a good healthy no-nonsense girl to raise your kids and keep your house and never raise any storms while you had your fun on the outside?”

He was as angry as she was. “Laurie's all right. You don't know anything about her.”

“So I shouldn't breathe her name, is that it? Well, I know as much about her as you do about Barry.”

I've done it, I've killed it, she thought with dreadful calm. This is really the end. Suddenly before her smarting eyes his face broke up into slashes and creases of laughter. “Oh, good God! I apologize, I take all the blame, I started it!”

He crawled over to her on hands and knees and put his face close to hers. “You know what your eyes do when you're mad? Change color, I swear it. I can't tell whether they're green or yellow or no color at all. How do you do it?” He is managing me, she thought frigidly. The famous Bennett charm. The famous
Owen
Bennett charm. Cap'n Owen, he's Jesus's little brother, didn't you know ? Or the devil's. She would not be won, her face went to stone as it did when she burned the book of poetry, and he knelt by her with his hands on her shoulders, waited, then shook her a little. “Is anybody there?” he asked. “Or have you gone away?” Still smiling, his eyes fixed on her intentionally glazed ones, he ground his fingers into her shoulders until she winced. “You're still there,” he said. “What are you thinking or don't you think at all when you look like that?”

“Why'd Laurie send me plants the other day?” she blurted.

“Did you put them in, or give 'em a heave over the bank?”

“I put them in. It's not their fault.”

“What isn't? Oh, don't answer. I thought we weren't going to talk about Laurie and Barry. No, she sent them because you like lily of the valley. You told my sister so.”

“What else do they pass on about me? Do they all think poor Barry's a song bird in a hawk's clutches?”

He let her go and sprawled back again, propped on one elbow, fishing in a shirt pocket for cigarettes. He held the package out to her and she shook her head. “Let's see what I've heard,” he said, his eyes in slits. “Oh, nasty things. Turn your stomach . . . .What do you think they think?”

Proudly she turned her face away. He said, “You're too self-centered. They've got other things to notice beside you. When they do think about you, they like you. You know how to be a lobsterman's wife,” he said sardonically. “At least as far as the women can see. So they approve. That suit you?”

“You'd have to say that,” she grumbled. “You're related to most of them.” But she was satisfied that all her work had paid off. She had presented an image to them, and they believed what they saw.

“Five minutes more,” he said. He put his hand on the nape of her neck and caressed it. She shivered and at the same time respnted the action and her own reaction. It was the casually affectionate gesture one gave to a dog, and she tried not to lean back against his hand.

Neither spoke. Suddenly, well before the five minutes were up, he took his hand away and got up.

There was nothing said about meeting again, there was no guarantee that there would be anything more than this, but she did not allow herself to concede that in a week from now it might already be in the past. Nor would she dream forward to other meetings. The Day had imposed its discipline since she was twelve; she glided from one moment to the next, fluid as water and yet rigidly controlled, her only indulgence to wonder if he thought about her at all when she was out of his sight. She would not conjecture what she was to him. For
her
, he was the true north toward which her needle had always pointed. Their coming-together was inexorable, but even to herself she used no words of love or tenderness, for none had passed between them even that night on top of the hill in the woods.

She wanted to see if she could find that place, but it would mean going by the Fennells', and Nora Fennell would think it queer if she tramped through the dooryard without stopping in. Besides, she had a half-superstitious fancy that she'd never be able to find the place, that it had existed only on that night.

Meanwhile she knit his trapheads, and did not allow herself to imagine that he might come unexpectedly to the door and say he'd come for the finished heads; in reality it would be because he wanted to look at her again. Such fantasies could make you sick, spread a veil between you and reality. I'll look for you when I see you coming, she told him silently, watching
White Lady
ride into the harbor on towering seas; Steve Bennett's
Philippa
rolled deep on one side, and Nils Sorensen came in behind, easing his boat when she slid downhill on the smoking green slopes. Charles rounded the breakwater after them, sinking out of sight in the trough. There were other fishermen, but when the family came close on each other's wakes it was like watching an armada.

“Arrogant bastards,” she said aloud over the traphead twine, but without the earlier venom. They weren't all that invincible. She'd gotten under the hide of one of them.

O
n Saturday night they went to the Dinsmores' for baked beans and homemade brown bread Rob's round mild face was flushed and smiling perpetually with shyness and pleasure. Mag was excited, flashing between stove and table like a goldfish in its globe. Barry was easy with them, and they felt perfectly at ease with him; he was one of Rob's kind, the well-meaning but inadequate kind who could never be his own man. Whenever he attempted it, he would attract disasters to him as a magnet attracts iron filings. Watching the two of them tonight, expanding in each other's company, intensely absorbed in lobstering talk, she thought, This is the only way they feel safe. In Philip's shadow, in Owen's. Even the shadows are stronger than they are.

Maggie was leaning against the dresser watching her with a smiling glance as she watched the men. “Isn't that the limit?” she said. “They never get tired talking about boats and how somebody did on the Coombe Spot, and how fast they got away from a breaker when it broke under them.”

“Did you ever hear how long a couple of lobstermen can keep going on different ways to knit a traphead?”

“All I can say is, their wives have to be born to it or else they'd go crazy.” Mag handed a wooden bowl of salad to Diane. “Be careful, sweetie. Here, Tammie, you can carry the fork and spoon. . . . Though I have to say Liza does real well, coming from away and all. And my lands, the people she met when she worked on that magazine! Movie stars and duchesses and everything.” She was incandescent with awe. “And here she is on Bennett's, just as natural as you please. Gina, now—” She cocked her head at the children, then pursed her lips and chose her words with caution. “Well, it's hard for her, being so young. Lonesome, you know. City girl. She thinks Willy ought to've learned the whole trade in six months so they can go back to the mainland and make a fortune.”

Barry heard that and laughed. “Lordie, he's not out of the primer class yet.” He pulled Tammie gently to him and onto his knee. Tiger came bristling out from under the stove, and Barry said, “I just want to heft her, boy. I got no little girls of my own and my lap's being wasted.” The child ducked her chin in her bashful pleasure. Barry reached out and drew Mane to his side. “Now I've got two. You going to give 'em to me, Rob?”

“I dunno. I'd have to study on that. Times when I'd part with 'em gladly, but then who'd get my slippers for me and stand my boots beside the stove?”

“Tiger could,” suggested Diane and buried her giggles in Barry's shoulder.

“He just loves young ones,” Mag murmured to Van. “Well, you do too,” she added with humorous defiance, “and don't say you don't, the way you handled these two when Rob hurt his hand.” She sighed, shook her head, and then sang out, “I'm about to take the beans out of the oven!”

It was no effort for Vanessa to be pleasant tonight. She felt so detached and objective these days, as if she floated a little to one side and slightly above the rest. She realized that Rob was bashful about being at the table with her. He wasn't going to enjoy his food, and his good hand fumbled with the silver as if he'd never held a fork before. It amused her to put herself out to get him over his nervousness.

“When I was a kid this was always my favorite meal of the week,” she said to him. “I'd come up from the shore all smelly with bait where I'd been helping to bag up, and so hungry I could hardly stand to get washed, but I couldn't come to the table till I'd got the herring out of my ears.”