The Seasons Hereafter (27 page)

“Here she is!” Owen was there, between her and the sun, taking her coat and picking up her bag. “Are you all right?” he asked sharply, bending his head to look into her face.

“I think I was just about to get carsick.”

“You should have told him you'd rather ride in front. You want a drink before we start out?”

She shook her head. “No, let's just get going.”

“The car's over here.” She followed him, blinking like a child fighting to keep from bursting into howls of despair among strangers. The other man gave her a nod and a bashful smile. “How d'you do? Well, it's been nice talking to you, sir,” he said to Owen. “You've got my card, now remember it, if you ever need anything in the way of marine valves.”

“I shall.” They shook hands warmly. She was in the front seat of the car, her things put in the back, and doors were slamming shut. They were circling out onto the road. Owen did not speak and she didn't look at him but stared through the windshield at the road which appeared like a steel-blue band flattening before them. The whole scene lay in a dazzling haze. The sense of being in a foreign country now became nightmarish.

Suddenly the car swung off the macadam and onto a dirt road between stone walls, into the low rustling shade of maples. They pulled off onto a wide verge, and some black-and-white cattle stood regarding them solemnly over the wall.

“Now what in hell's the matter?” said Owen. She looked sidewise under her lashes at his hands resting on the wheel. “You act like some sixteen-year-old kid, never been touched, going out on a dare and scared foolish. You think we'll be caught—checked up on somehow—is that it?”

“No, no! I'm like this,” she began uncertainly. Another little piece of herself was going. But you couldn't just sit here, stupid and shaking. “I—I freeze. Or melt. Or dissolve. I don't know what.” Vanessa was going away from her down Water Street. “I lift way up and it's wonderful. Anything can do it. It used to be my lilies of the valley. Or my house. The way the light fell on it in certain ways, you could see how it used to be when it was alive . . .” It was a long street and at the far end there was a tall free woman in a blowing black raincoat, with books under her arm. She wanted to call her back before she disappeared, but instead she went on saying, “Then something happens just as suddenly to make me go the other way. Down. And it's like dying, only at least when you're dying you don't think so much. I'm talking in bunches.” She clasped her hands to keep from putting one against her mouth.

Owen turned sidewise and put his arm along the seat behind her. “You know what you sound like?” he said.

“A lunatic.” He would drive her back now, but it would be too late; with every wretched laboring word she had driven Vanessa away.

“No. A Bennett.” He began to laugh. His arm dropped around her and pulled her up to him. He spoke against her temple. “A goddam Bennett. Up one minute and down the next. Only when a Bennett is down there's hell to pay. We make sure everybody knows it, by God.”

“No one else knows how I am,” she said bleakly, stiff as a dummy against his shoulder. “I've never talked about myself to anyone.”

“And it's sticking in your throat now. Well, I'm not anyone, am I? You'd better make damn sure I'm not.” She felt the laughter in his chest rather than heard it. “Your hair smells good. And hey, what's this?” His fingers fumbled at the collar of the silk shirt, gently brushing her skin. “I haven't had a chance yet to tell you how handsome you looked getting out of that taxi.” He rested his hand lightly across her throat so that it beat under his fingers. “We never have enough time,” he said. “That's what this is for, remember?”

“I remember.” She was coming to life again, she rejoiced at the tiny yet specific spark of warmth deep within her. She relaxed against him and sighed. Everything, even the solemnly chewing cows, began to intensify in beauty and significance. Owen took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his, and kissed her. Then he started the car and backed out onto the road.

They stopped at a place where the cabins were built on the side of a hill between spruce woods and a rocky shore; he had been there before on his way to Canada with one of his brothers to buy a boat. She expected to be stiff and lumpish in the enforced intimacy of their small quarters. It occurred to her as she stood in the small bathroom washing her face and putting on fresh lipstick that Owen might suddenly be attacked by conscience; she dreaded going to eat at the log-cabin restaurant across the road for fear of seeing children there that would remind him of his own. She herself felt nothing. Barry was less consequential than some of her dreams had been. Limerock and even Bennett's Island might have ceased to exist the instant she turned her back on them.

She put on the apricot silk shirt again and went out into the bedroom. Owen stood looking out into the spring dusk. But he turned quickly and he was smiling. “There are times,” he said across the room, “when I think what a hell of a thing to happen to me when I'm fifty. Then I think, what a hell of a thing if it hadn't happened at all.”

“If we'd missed each other somehow,” she said. “If they hadn't made me go to Bennett's by taking the house. If it had been to some other island.” The cool words wavered. “I always believed in The Day, and now I know it almost mightn't have happened. For all of my life to be so sure of The Day I could live by it, and then to know there was nothing sure about it. It makes me sick.”

He crossed the room quickly and took her by the shoulders. “We're here. It did happen. Nothing can change it. Tell me more about The Day.”

“I'll tell you later,” she said, suddenly drunk with the desire to tell him everything so there would be no one last thing he didn't know about her.

In the morning sunrise woke them. She liked the way he awoke, all at once. “There's one thing I appreciate about the Bennetts,” she told him. “Their vitality.”

“That all?”

“Well, they produced you. Otherwise—”

“Otherwise what?”

“You really don't know how your family strikes people, do you?”

“I didn't expect to bring 'em along on this trip,” he said dryly. “This is my life, my business, nobody else's. . . . You didn't tell me last night about The Day.”

Hearing the words in his voice gave them a shocking familiarity. “Oh, I just meant the day we'd meet, that's all,” she hedged.

“You didn't say it like that. You said it was something you knew about and I didn't.”

“All I meant was that I knew I'd have to be in love once before I die. It was owed to me.”

“It's owed to everybody,” he said, “but how many get it? How many walk through their days just half-living, and go to their graves never knowing what it's like?”

“What is it like?” she asked him.

“You tell me,” he said.

“It's like having everything come true at once, knowing it's all true, even the silliest songs they bleat out over the radio, twanging those guitars. And the hardest poems to understand, and the way writers tie themselves up in knots trying to put it into books. It's all there, the most foolish things and the most tragic things, but so much more that nobody else can tell you, no matter how many words they know or how well they can put them together.” They were silent, touching yet curiously detached, watching the light run across the ceiling. “I suppose that with each person it's something different. It makes some feel noble, and some feel sick, and some anxious, and some walk on air. You can blow hot and cold, you have pains in your stomach—nobody ever put that in a poem—you're scared witless one minute and think you can do anything the next.” He didn't answer and she said abruptly, “I'm talking too much. I sound like a nut.”

“I like to hear you talk,” he said. “Which way do you feel, out of all those?”

“All of them,” she said. “What about you?”

“All of them. I get that pain in the gut sometimes when you take me by surprise. When I come face to face with you in the store. And when—” He stopped so abruptly that the silence was like an alarm bell clanging in the room. Then he turned over onto his side and propped his head up on his hand, looking into her face. “There's something you didn't mention. Age. There's no such thing as an old lover or a young lover. There's just a lover.”

“It's true, isn't it?” she said. “You are or you aren't.” What was he going to say when he stopped himself? She didn't dare ask him.

He said, “What are you thinking? You're staring at me like a cat. Eyes the same color as one, and never a blink.”

“Maybe I'm not thinking. Maybe I'm more like a cat than you realize.”

He ducked his head and gave her a brief hard kiss, then rolled away from her and out of bed. “Maybe you are. Come on, let's go to breakfast.”

“W
here are we going?” she asked him when they drove out.

“To do what I've always wanted to do. Poke off down all the little side roads to the gunkholes. We'll come back tonight.” He didn't mention Monday, and as long as neither did, it wasn't there. For their purposes Sunday was as long as a week, a month. The day danced like the rainbow light from a swinging prism. The roads were empty this early, and they saw deer in a field, a fox running, late geese going over. They drove down winding roads into small villages, and had coffee and doughnuts in a shack on a wharf. Owen talked with a man who'd had to be towed in. “Serves me right for hauling on Sunday. The wife'll laugh her fool head off. She's in church.” His eyes picked up Van's with amused courtesy, as if bowing to all wives.

Van smiled back at him with the kind of modest pride a wife would show. Owen asked him how the spring lobstering was up here, and she took her mug of coffee and went to read a bulletin board by the door. There were shaggy kittens for the asking, a dory for sale and a secondhand gas stove. Someone filed saws and sharpened scythes. There was a snapshot of a thirty-six-foot boat to be seen in Mackerel Gut, and a girl named Proserpine Bartlett wanted baby-sitting jobs. “What do they call her for short?” Vanessa asked the large woman behind the counter.

“Prossie,” said the woman.

“What was it she ate?” said Van. “Not a persimmon—no, a pomegranate. So afterward she had to spend part of each year down there with him.”

The woman looked puzzled, then gave her a sort of all-purpose smile, polite and not understanding. “Prossie's named for her grandmother,” she said. “She was Prosser-pine Bartlett too, and they called
her
Piney.”

“It's a nice name,” said Vanessa, and turned back to reading the notices. Owen's arm came over her shoulder and his finger rested on an unobtrusive card that read in neat but uneven printing, “Island for sale. Twenty-five acres, seven-room house, deep-dug well never known to go dry, wharf and fishhouse, deep-water anchorage. Right of way from black road to shore. Inquire at house, Jessup's Cove.”

“Here's a place to go,” Owen said. Over his shoulder he said to the men, “How do you get to Jessup's Cove?”

“You island-buying?” asked one of the men gruffly. His eyes flickered rapidly from Owen to Vanessa and back again. Owen grinned.

“We're islanders to begin with. From out in the mouth of Penobscot Bay. Nope, we're tourists this weekend.”

“Oh.” There was a change in the man, not seen but realized, as if his red granite features had begun to give off warmth as ledges do at noon. He gave Owen some directions, and they all said good-by like old friends.

The dirt road led out of the spruce woods to the rim of this eastern bay, in which the islands lay blue-black on a polished morning sea. The great calm glitter filled the eye, and at the same time the noise of birds and counterpoint of distant church bells filled the ear. They waited for a few moments at the top of the rise, not speaking, just looking and listening. Then Owen drove slowly down toward the one house and the large barn. Cats sunned in the barn doorway and barn swallows went in and out over their heads. Tree swallows soared and squabbled over the houses set on poles wound with chicken wire to discourage cats and squirrels. The fields had been mown in the fall and now were as tidy as green carpets surrounding the house. They fell away to the shore, to the gray-shingled fish-house with its hanging rows of orange-and-black buoys, and the wharf.

After the car stopped, it was as if the world had been reduced to this one spot. Vanessa sat without moving; to shift a foot would be to shatter the illusion. But Owen got out of the car and went toward the back door, and nothing happened, except that two of the barn swallows knew him for a stranger and flew down at his head. She dared to breathe more deeply and got out of the car. Gulls sunned on the fishhouse ridgepole in the summer-warm peace; Among the new leaves of the orchard a robin began to sing over and over; a small salt wind lifted the hair on Van's forehead and was gone.

A raw-boned woman came into the sun and pointed out the island that was for sale. There was a dory and outboard rig tied off the wharf that they could use. “My husband and I started housekeeping out there,” she said. “His folks lived here then. We raised our family out there too. The young ones came in and stayed with Gramp when they went to school. I always figgered we'd live out there till we was too old to manage all the lugging, and we'd be alone like we was at first. But then Tom took this stroke.” She said it dryly, without self-pity. Her wintry eyes took in Owen. “He was a big one like you, but yellow-haired. He'd be like morning beside you, and you night.”

“You're all alone here then,” said Owen.

“Oh no. Tom's here. But he's shrunk so, and he can't get out of bed without me to help him. . . . No, this is the best place for us. The young ones put in the bathroom and the telephone and they keep an eye on us.” Her laugh was short and harsh. “Ayuh. I guess my island days are over. Well, you can't be a gull forever.”