The Seasons Hereafter (20 page)

“But that never happens now! How many people did you ever know died that way?”

“My mother did,” she said.

“How do you know? You don't know anything about your mother!”

“I do now.” She saw the scene rolling out vividly before her, a color movie projected on the ceiling. “I didn't tell you before because I didn't want to think of it. But one day about two years ago I met Miss Foster in Limerock. It was right in front of the People's Bank building.”

She was wearing that wine suede jacket Barry'd gone into debt for one Christmas, and black slacks. Miss Foster was wearing that blue suit she always used to wear when she came to Mrs. Bearse's, with different gloves and blouses. No, don't be silly, she wouldn't still be wearing it ten years later, and she'd look older too. And her hair would be gray but still curly. “I never realized Miss Foster was such a pretty woman,” she said aloud. “I don't suppose I really saw her as a human being at all, back in those days.”

“What did she say about your mother?” Barry persisted. People went back and forth through the bank doors behind them, the doors kept flashing in the sun. Cars streamed by. “She invited me into Scott's for a cup of coffee,” said Van, shifting the scenes and instantly conceiving a ferocious hunger for a warm honey-dipped yeast doughnut. “I had a raised doughnut,” she told Barry dreamily. “I wish I had a good recipe for them.”

“For God's sake get on with it!” He threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, scrabbling around for cigarettes.

“I remember the doughnut, because afterward when I felt sick I blamed it on the doughnut, but that wasn't really it. She told me—she told me—” She faltered as the scene became jerky and out of focus. Would Miss Foster lead up to it or come straight out with the facts?

“She said, ‘You know how you always wanted to know about your mother.' I didn't know what was coming. I didn't know what I wanted to hear. I mean, I knew I wasn't suddenly going to be presented with a perfect mother. But with
what
?”

Barry thought the huskiness in her voice was due to emotion. “You want a cigarette?” he offered kindly.

“No, I'll hurry and get it over with.” She was actually making herself a little sick living the scene; the smell of fresh doughnuts was now nauseating. “I won't go into all the details. But just by sheer coincidence, a case-worker found out about my mother when she was investigating another case. It's so crazy I could hardly believe it, but Miss Foster wouldn't have told me if she wasn't sure. She said she checked and double-checked.” She cleared her throat. “I—I wasn't abandoned by my mother, Barry. She died having me. She was too narrow, you see. There wasn't enough room for the baby, if you can imagine me being a baby—to come down—through —out, whatever the right word is. They started a Caesarian, but she'd been hemorrhaging, and so—” The last word floated. Trapped in her own spell, she saw torrents of blood. “This friend of hers—so-called—took me. They don't think she made any attempt to get in touch with my father . . .” Her voice sank. “They weren't married, and he wasn't a soldier, he was a Coast Guardsman, and he'd been sent somewhere else. But maybe if he'd known he'd have come for me. . . . This woman,
she
was the one who abandoned me. She left me with someone for a day, she said, and never came back. That's how the state got me.”

“What a rotten deal,” Barry groaned. “My Jesus, poor little tyke.” He rolled her back into bed and put his arms around her, not offended this time by her stiffness. “Poor baby. What kind of a bitch was she, anyway?”

“She must have had a conscience of a sort,” she said dryly. “That's how this case-worker found out.” It was a relief to leave the bloody operating room for the slattern slopping tea and pouring out her guilt to the case-worker, one of those fresh-faced young college girls. “She'd gone there to see about the grandchildren,” she said, watching the new scene. “The bitch had a bunch of them, none of them legal, and each of 'em with a different father. She wanted the state to take them over. So she started talking about me, as if she'd planned the whole thing, you know, done the best thing for me. . . . She'd named me after my mother. Anna Howard. So when the girl went back to the office she asked Miss Foster about that name.”

Barry hauled her close to him, all comfort now and no sliding hands. She was surprised to be so cold; the story had been almost too good, her mouth had been trembling there at the end. “Poor little Anna Howard,” he said. “But now you know. . . . I mean, it makes a difference, doesn't it, knowing your mother didn't drop you somewhere and skin off and leave you?”

Her trembling increased to a shudder. Mouth locked shut she rolled out of Barry's arms and out of bed and felt her way downstairs in the dark, hearing him call after her as she concentrated on not vomiting on the stairs. She accomplished it in the wash basin, and was lying over the dresser shivering, waiting for the next spasm, when Barry came down and lit a lamp.

He looked at the basin and whistled. “You almost puked your guts out!” he said in awe. “That
did
upset you, didn't it?” He walked around barefooted in his shorts and undershirt, putting the teakettle on the gas stove to heat, shaking his head and making reverent comments that made Van want to shout at him to keep quiet. She thought she had never been so nastily cold in her life, her pajamas glued to her with sweat, her hair damp.

“Will you take that basin out to the toilet and dump it?” she finally asked him, on her dizzy way to the sitting-room couch. He pulled on pants and shoes and went out, and when he came back he asked her if she wanted a cup of tea.

“It might start everything up again,” she said between chattering teeth. She burrowed into the blankets. “I'll stay here the rest of the night, I guess. I'm scared of what'll happen if I move.”

He brought her another blanket, and a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. She thanked him, beginning to float now in reaction, the heat from the water bottle spreading deliciously into her stomach. He went out to the kitchen and made a cup of cocoa for himself. She lay there listening to the faint clinkings, and the rattle of a magazine page. He was enjoying his tenderness and concern; he would tell about it tomorrow, though not the reason for the attack, and he would exaggerate her helplessness and dependence on him, adding details that would surely infuriate her if she knew them. Oh well, he has to have something, she thought, and it would be quite a long time before he talked babies again.

She marveled at her own reaction to her lies. It was as if she had lived it through, been both the mother dying of exhaustion and the child fighting to be born; and she had been the winner in the ghastly duel but knew also what it was to the in defeat. It could have been that way, she thought, and maybe I know it in my subconscious, maybe I was living it all again. But if that woman exists, that bitch who never wrote to my father, I should have known it. If I ever passed anywhere near her in Limerock the truth should have clanged and battered in my ears. I want to kill her. She stole my father from me. Why didn't she throw me into the harbor one night and be done with it? No, she stole. . . . Vanessa fell asleep on the word, crying silently, while Barry was still drinking cocoa and reading out in the kitchen.

I
t had been a week since the time in the clearing; she had promised herself then not to try to make things happen, and she had kept her equilibrium marvelously well, except when the little surprises almost knocked her off balance. The sound of his name on somebody else's lips; a family joke referred to by Joanna at the sewing circle and laughed at by Laurie, something that concerned Owen; the sight of him unexpectedly at mail time, when he was supposed to be out hauling. That was the worst of the surprises. Past the other women's ears and shoulders he had glanced at her and no more.
But steal me a blink of your bonny black e'e
, and this wasn't even a blink. In its indifference it wiped out everything. He stood with his arm around his brother Steve's wife, and called Gina Elizabeth Taylor, which she took—not surprisingly—as a compliment. Conceited bastard! Van raged, gazing blindly at her grocery list, then thought, I'm probably the only bona-fide one hundred per cent pure bastard in this room. . . . It was assuaging, as if she'd yelled a dirty word aloud, shocked them all into silence, and swaggered out.

Then she was ashamed and angry, and had to work hard to keep from hurrying away. Crazy behavior even in your thoughts was unforgivable. With a sense of bitterly won victory she felt the heat subside in her, the heartbeat slow, her vision grow clear so that she could make sense of her grocery list. Owen left in a few minutes, and the last tightness loosened in Van's chest.

She walked home with Kathy in the razor-sharp azure light of a northwest day, cold in the wind that blew the tops like smoke off the crests in the harbor, June-hot in the lee. She laughed and talked with Kathy, hearing herself with a sort of despairing wonder that she should do so well. It was a triumph, but of what and for what?

The two younger children, over their chicken pox, played in the old skiff hauled up in the grass. School was out, and Cindy, the oldest, and the Dinsmore girls were hurrying away to their playhouse in the woods on the point, carrying their dolls and paper carryall bags, and a brand-new orange crate. “Oh, to be that age, again,” Van said to Kathy, like a proper young woman. She walked across the bright grass toward her own back door. The lilies of the valley were growing. At first she had hoped they would die, but now she saw a stubborn poetry in their existence. Crows flew up jeering from the yard, whereupon the small birds came back.

The gulls went circling, circling high over Long Cove. She stood on the doorstep and watched them. She heard a sound from inside the house and was half-decided to go then over to the beach rather than listen to Barry. I'm like the kids, she thought wryly, I want to rush to my playhouse and make new rooms out of mussel shells.

But she went in anyway, to get a drink of water, and Owen was standing by the table, holding a mug of coffee.

She jumped violently. “Where's Barry?” she said.

“Spinning cuffers around the shore somewhere. You can move away from the door. I didn't come with intent to rape.” He took a drink from the mug. “How many heads you got ready?”

“Enough for a hundred traps.”

“I'll take them. Got anything to go with this coffee or don't you cook?”

“There's some cookies in that can, since you're so good at helping yourself. I'll get the heads.” She went around the other side of the table and he didn't move, but as she entered the sitting room she heard the mug set down on the table and he came along beside her and put an arm around her ribs, clamping tight.

“What's the idea of looking at me with those yellow eyes as if you hated my guts?”

“What's the idea of looking at me as if I was a common tramp, and making yourself at home in my kitchen? With Barry's favorite mug, too.”

He began to laugh and both hands squeezed tighter over her ribs as if he were trying to crush them in. “I don't know why I'm laughing, because God knows it's not funny. I couldn't stand to look at you straight in the eye today for fear of showing it.”

She was so glad she began to laugh too, but proudly, so as not to show her relief. “I thought seeing me with all the others you were ashamed, you wanted to show me I was nothing to you unless it was something contemptible. I suppose that's what I am, beside them.”

“Shut up.
Shut up
.” He shook her. “Somebody'll come ramming in here any minute. Listen. Steve and his family are going to Vinalhaven for the weekend. Tomorrow afternoon I'll be down at his place. I want you to come down there. Make it around three, and come down along the shore. If you meet any kids prowling around, you're bird-watching. That covers everything around here but hauling somebody else's pots.”

She released herself and walked into the sun parlor and began lifting the bundles of heads off the wall.

“You want me to pay you as you go along or when you're all through?” he asked.

“When I'm all through.” She laid the lustrous knotted festoons over his outstretched arm, counting to herself in whispers, very busy and seeing nothing else. He stood looking at her. Looking was too weak a word; his eyes left a track of heat wherever they touched.

“Two lots of fifty big heads in each,” she murmured. “Four lots of fifty side heads each. That's it. . . . It's nice twine,” she said, turning away and arranging the filled needles that lay on the window sill. “It holds a good tight knot.” She saw Barry rowing in to his wharf with quick short strokes, his cap pushed boyishly back. He pulled abreast of Terence Campion, and they were calling back and forth and laughing. Owen said heavily, “Well, I'll get out before Peter Pan nails me.” She listened to him without turning around. He slammed doors behind him. When he didn't appear by the end of the house, she realized he must have gone back the way he'd come, across the field behind the houses. There was a finality about his disappearance, like death.

She had not told him she'd come, she'd shown him nothing but insolence and indifference. She linked her fingers and crushed them against one another, pressing the palms together until her wrists ached. How could I, how could I? she mourned. I love him.

She jumped as if she'd been caught saying the words aloud. Saying them even to herself, the shock was as great.
Love
. How ridiculous! I don't love. I'm incapable of love, she thought haughtily.

In the morning the warming-up of engines competed with the dawn chorus of birds. Barry was set up with new importance; Philip and his wife were going to Vinalhaven with Steve, and Barry was going to use
Kestrel
to haul some deep water traps a long way off shore.