The Seasons Hereafter (24 page)

“No, she wasn't much with her hands,” said Van. “Another woman taught me this.” It had been Mrs. Bearse.

It was a way to use up a few hours. They went slowly enough, but they'd have stood still if she hadn't put herself out. Mag's pleasure in her company, and Barry's beams and winks were what she had to pay.

That night Barry wanted to make love to her. It had been a long time and he promised her he would take no chances. Besides, she felt a little guilty because he had been so compassionate about the story of her birth. The guilt surprised her, but it was undeniably there. Of course the lie had given Barry a chance to be sorry for her, which he enjoyed, but his pity was genuine just the same, and he had put it—for the time being—above his ambition to father a child.

For a long time she hadn't been much of a participant, and she wondered if Barry felt cheated when he remembered how she had once been with him. But he had never said so. Perhaps he thought that was the way some women were and that only whores were different. When he slept, she lay awake in the dark and remembered how the tiger had been evoked in this room, and she wondered about the love-making of tigers.

In the morning after Barry had gone she took her breakfast into the sun parlor, and saw that the new batch of trapheads no longer hung on the wall. Owen had come that night after all, while they were at the Dinsmores'.

That afternoon she walked the curve of Schoolhouse Point, down by the water. At the far end, where the land hooked steeply into the tall granite prow of Windward Point,
White Lady
was tied up in the L of the wharf. The workshop and baithouse seemed to grow out of the almost vertical bank above.

She climbed up over exposed ledges and walked between stacks of new traps headed with her work, and then onto the broad steep ramp of planks laid from the wharf to the fishhouse door. Until now the action of the water splashing among rocks and around the wharf spilings had drowned out any other sound. But now she heard a hammer, and for the first time admitted that she had hoped he would be there. Until now she had kept up the fiction that this was simply a walk and that Owen was certainly around the harbor somewhere or at home.

She found herself out of breath, not from exertion, and stopped between the open door and a window. Inside someone came noisily down a flight of steps, and a young boy's voice said, “Hey, Dad, can I have this bailing scoop I found upstairs?”

“I thought you had a bailer for the dory, the one you made out of a Clorox jug.” The hammer went on. Heading traps. She knew the rhythm.

“Ayuh, but this is a real one. I mean, it's wood, and you made it, didn't you?”

“Yep. You can have it.” That he was lifting the trap off the bench now, she could tell by the way he spoke. “I'll have to take a look up there. Every time you go up you come down with something different. You're likely to show up with buried treasure next.”

There was a little-boy giggle, and then Holly's composed voice. “Maybe you should look around, Daddy. I bet pirates have been coming ashore here on dark nights and stowing stuff away.”

“Pirates,” the boy scoffed. “They don't have them now.”

“How do you know? Have you looked in the sea chest lately? There could be a body in there.” She paused. The hammer tapped precisely. “Dismembered,” Holly added. “That means—”

“I know what it means,” the boy snarled.

“I was reading,” his sister continued, “where these kids kept finding all these brown-paper packages in this dump, and what do you suppose they turned out to be?”

“A bunch of girls who couldn't keep their mouths shut,” said Owen.

“No, it was just one girl, in hunks.”

“I bet her name was Holly too,” said the boy bravely, “and her brother did it.”

“In self-defense,” said Owen. “That's enough. You may not find yourself in hunks, my girl, but you could find yourself in durance vile, as the feller says, and with nothing to read. Rich, you go out and get yourself a mouthful of fresh air. And start gathering up a pile of loose ballast for those new traps.”

It was too late to get away without being seen. Vanessa and the boy confronted one another. He looked like his mother, round-headed and rosy-cheeked, with blue eyes slightly uptilted at the outer corners; they saw her with surprise and then a brightly curious friendliness. “Hi, Mrs. Barton! Hey, Dad!” He looked back into the dim workshop shot through with sunlight. At the bench, his hand on a trap, Owen half-turned toward her and froze. The little girl was knitting baitbags by the two small front windows, she too gazed over her shoulder, motionless with surprise. Then the boy shot on past Van and down toward the wharf, and the two inside came alive.

“Afternoon.” Owen half-growled it and turned back to the work bench. Holly said with pleasure, “Hello, Mrs. Barton.”

“I guess I'm trespassing,” said Van. “I was out for a walk and I kept on going. I didn't know anyone was here.” She stayed in the doorway, blushing foolishly. She felt the aura of his displeasure across the room. Motion overhead attracted her and she looked up at the light ripples that flowed constantly across the ceiling reflecting from the sunny waters of the cove.

“Isn't that pretty?” asked Holly. “I wish our house was where I could have those reflections in my room.”

“You'll have to move down here,” said Van.

“I wish I could.” She gave her father a quick little scowl, ridiculously like his. “Won't you come in?” she asked politely. “There's a nice view from these windows.”

Damn you, she said to Owen's broad shoulders, It's your fault. “I'd like to see it,” she said to Holly. She had to walk past Owen and the bench and he didn't look around, though out of the corner of her eye she saw his fingers fitting the small white net she had woven. Holly had her baitbag hook in a scarred window sill, and a little armless rocker. She kept on knitting, with brisk decisive movements and a preoccupied face, and Van knew she was expected to be impressed.

“You make a good strong knot,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Holly primly, as if it were bad manners to show pleasure at being praised. “I make all Daddy's baitbags. He pays me.”

“That's good. I wouldn't want to see him take advantage of you just because you're in the family,” Van said, and Holly gave her an upward glance, black eyes narrowing with held-back laughter. It was so unexpectedly and unfairly Owen's gesture that her belly went hollow, as if the black head had crashed into it. Her hands trembled in her pockets. She took them out and braced the fingers on the middle sash of a window. “Yes, it's quite a view,” she said. “You really should move down here, Holly.”

“You ought to be here in a storm!” Holly exulted. “Once Rich and I came down here to watch the surf in the cove, and it began to blow so hard we thought the roof of the shop was coming off—oh, you should have felt the whole place shake and shudder—so we started back, and the combers were crashing in both sides of the point so the air was full of spray. We really got scared. We were afraid the wind would blow us overboard so we crawled on our stomachs. Then Daddy came out to meet us and grabbed us both—Well, not
really
by the scruff of the necks,” she said gently with a glance at him, “but I thought he was going to. He was so mad he could have done I don't know what. He thought all the time we were out playing in the barn, till he looked out the window and saw us crawling along the point. You see, it was a hurricane, and we didn't know it.” She added with some pride, “You should have heard Daddy
swear
!”

Vanessa shook her head, as if she were beyond words. She saw him in the sheeting rain, grasping his two children, swearing at them out of his agony of love and terror.

Down on the beach below Rich scrambled about on the shifting stones, gathering flat rocks for loose ballast and carrying them by the armful up to the place where the wharf met the bank. Inside, one trap was set out of the way, another lifted to the bench. Holly knit a few meshes, but she was clearly disturbed by her father's silence. After a moment she observed, “Sometimes my father is very quiet.”

Owen spoke in an ordinary tone. “Holly, run on back to the house and tell your mother to put the coffeepot on. Mrs. Barton's coming up.” Holly dropped her bait bag needle to dangle from the half-finished bag, and gave Van a conspirator's grin on her way out.

“And take Rich along with you,” Owen called after her. “He's lugged enough rocks for one day.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Outside the door she shouted between her cupped hands, “Rich-ard!”

“Her lungs are as powerful as her manners are,” said her father. Outside there was a shouted argument which ended when Owen put his head around the door and said, “Pipe down. And scatter.”

When they'd gone up by the door, he went on working for a few minutes, and Vanessa finished the row on Holly's bait bag. Then he left the shop and went up the way the children had gone, was out of sight for a moment, and returned. She knew he was standing by the bench watching her. Without looking around she said, “I don't have any intention of visiting your wife, and you know it.”

“How should I know? Around here women don't call on a married man in his fish house unless they're on the way to call on his wife.”

“I didn't have any intentions of visiting you,” she said stiffly.

“Bullshit. You saw the boat tied up here when you started around the cove, didn't you?”

“Yes, but you could have been at the house or down at the harbor.” She dropped the needle and bait bag and stood up. “Why in hell am I explaining anything to you? I've never been in the habit of explaining my actions to anyone.”

“That's obvious.” He leaned back against the bench and folded his arms. “And you've never felt any responsibilities to anyone, have you? Oh, in one way I don't blame you. Nobody felt much of a duty toward you except the state and that makes for damn cold mothering. But you married Barry on your own hook, and you must have been glad he was there for you to marry, but you don't feel any responsibility toward him, do you?”

“I was insane to tell you anything about myself.”

“I knew already about you and Barry. I told you that.”

She threw back her head in forced laughter. “You're a prize. You were quick enough to move in, but every time we meet I get a lecture on my marital duties. Why don't you ask when I went to bed with him last?”

“When did you?” he asked coldly. She walked by him toward the door. His arm went across the opening and held her back.

“Where are you going?”

“To my responsibilities. For good. It'll be a relief to feel like an honest housekeeper after being made to feel like a prostitute who dared to breathe the same air as your children did.”

“Don't be such a goddam fool.” He held her upper arms to her sides. She couldn't move, she wouldn't have been able to even if the touch had been easier. “How do you think I felt when I looked up and saw you in the doorway?” he said softly. “With them here? It was an ax smashing down through my skull, like slicing an apple in two.”

“Schizophrenia, in other words.” She tried to laugh.

“Call it anything. But it told me something I don't like. Scared the hell out of me, and that's a feeble way to say it.” He pulled her to him and put his face against her hair. “Oh, Christ,” he muttered. Held so tight she couldn't move to embrace him, she felt the pressure of his hands increase until tears of pain came into her eyes. “I love you,” he said. “I love you. Now will you get the hell out of here?” He turned her around and walked her to the door. She resisted, trying to squirm free and face him, but he was too strong. Frustration turned her frantic, the open doorway could have represented the edge of a cliff, and when she stepped through she would disintegrate; but she was saved from whatever shameful form it would take by a war-whoop from the path above.

She was released at once, and staggered against the doorframe. Holly burst in screaming and wrapped her arms around her father's waist and swung behind him, shrilling, “Save me, save me! He wants my long black tresses!” Richard pounded behind her, beating his hand against his mouth and whooping; Van's brain seemed to dance loose inside her head with the noise. She went blindly down the wharf. Behind her Holly gasped, “Mama isn't home. She left a note that she's gone to Aunt Jo's.”

“That's all right then,” said Owen. “Mrs. Barton can't stay anyway.”

“Good-by, Mrs. Barton!” the children called after her, gaily hysterical. She waved without speaking. Walking across the stones where Richard had been gathering ballast, the sun in her eyes, she saw the long curve of the cove that had to be traversed before she would be anywhere near shelter. Then there was the path across the marsh to the harbor, where there would be faces, and then around the shore more faces, all before she could get up into her room and bed. The terror of not making it became the chief thing now. She felt so delicately put together that a word could shatter her and she would go to pieces in front of everyone.

Now she was walking on the wet sand studded with boulders, and deliberately she sat down on one and took out her cigarettes. But don't forget, she said, you aren't insane. You've been all through that. You made up your mind one day that you wouldn't be. You're going to be proof that it can be held back. . . . Look. There is the shop up there on the bank. Think what colors you would use if you were an artist. Those mossy shingles. I hope they never reshingle it. There is the wharf below, and the boat.
White Lady Four
. Was the first
White Lady
named after someone? You don't know anything about him; that may be where the real abyss lies.

She was beginning to feel calmer, and very tired. Up there he is heading traps and the children are talking to him.
Sometimes my father is very quiet
. She blew out smoke and looked around her. A flock of little sea birds ran along the lacy edge of water swirling over the sand. They made small, fine, busy noises.