The Seasons Hereafter (5 page)

“We brought you some things to help out with your baking while you're getting settled,” said Mrs. Philip. “And if there's anything you need and can't find, just holler.”

“Thank you very much,” Vanessa said grimly, giving up the attempt to smile. She stood watching them go toward the next house. Barry can run around like a grateful mongrel, she thought, but I wasn't included in the deal.

The blonde girl came out as they reached her steps, and all three talked for a few moments, looking out across the harbor and now and then glancing toward her house. They're telling Dandelion-Head how stupid I am. Not a word out of me—not that they gave me the chance, they're so crazy about the sound of their own voices—and my trash still standing in the middle of the floor, and dishes in the sink. They'll probably take turns checking on me to see how I'm taking care of their goddam property.

Half-blind with tears, she pulled the man's raincoat off the hook and from habit picked up the book beside her coffee cup. The wrapped pans were on the dresser, and she wanted to hurl the whole business out over the rocks into the surf. But it was food and Barry could eat it; it would save her that much effort. She went out the back way and ran for the shelter of the point.

S
he cut behind the point, along the edge of cranberry bog to the high bank of stones, rockweed, and tide litter called Long Cove. She walked to the far end of the barrier beach, crossed an unused and rocky pasture, and discovered a thick stand of spruces with branches sweeping low to the ground. She lay on a sun-heated ledge here, reading and smoking, or watching the spring clouds move past the spruce tops and the high unhurried circling of gulls against them. When there were no boats hauling nearby she explored the shore. Broken sea-urchin shells and crab bodies littered the flat red ledges where the gulls fed. Damaged lobster traps, barnacled buoys and glass toggles, and wood in all forms—silver-smooth tree trunks, the side of a dory, odd shingles—lay about the rocks entangled in masses of rockweed.

She returned again and again. Out here she could maintain a comforting sense of invisibility, and pretend, too, that the others on the island didn't exist. This was simple, because since her arrival she had talked with no one but the two women who had called. The next morning some psychic impulse had made her glance out toward the Campions'—a view which she usually avoided—and Dandelion-Head was coming with a covered plate and a coffeepot. She'd had just time to latch the back door and get upstairs, where she stood without moving and almost without breathing until the knocking stopped. After that, no doubt Dandelion-Head carried her treat over to the house on the other side and spent a happy hour telling her neighbor that Barry's wife was an oddball, and poor Barry, wasn't it a shame how such nice men got caught by such awful women.

One mild pearly day it began to rain while she was out. At first the drops were gentle and infrequent, and she didn't start home, but sat on the big shelves of rock, liking this emptiness smelling of deep water and of old rockweed rotting, and the sea pale and quiet for a change, with a flock of eider ducks talking and splashing a little way off shore. The crows and gulls were now used to her in her black raincoat, and walked near her on their foraging. It rained harder, the drops hissing on the satiny water, and then it rained very hard; she put her book under the raincoat and started back along the beach. It was impossible to run on the ridge of loose stones, and there was no shelter from the rain. The coat was no longer weather proof, and her feet squelched in wet socks and sneakers. For the first time she thought of the house with some pleasure; it meant warmth and dryness, and no one would come calling in the rain.

Barry was in the kitchen. Expecting him to be out hauling, she stared at him open-mouthed and he stared back, biting at the inside of one cheek. Then she saw beyond him the other man sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. Rain ran down her nose and the back of her neck, but men never made her feel as nakedly self-conscious as women did. She reached for a towel, and the man smiled at her and pushed back his chair. “I hope you don't mind a couple of scavengers making free with your kitchen while your back's turned.”

“Not at all, if you found something to scavenge,” she said, drying her face. “I think that was the wettest rain I ever tried to hurry home through but couldn't.”

“We never do anything by halves out here.”

“So I've noticed.” It was foolish, but they both laughed. She remembered him now from the first day, a big man, fair-haired but graying, with a rugged face.

Barry had been standing by in silence. He said in an oddly tight voice, “We came in with engine trouble, and I brought Phil home for a mug-up.”

“We found some uncommonly good doughnuts,” Bennett said.

“I'm afraid your wife made those,” Vanessa answered, and they both laughed again. She peeled off her dripping raincoat and dropped it, and flipped the towel expertly into a turban. Barry leaned down and picked up the raincoat as if it were a loathsome object, and muttered, “You'd better change your clothes before you get cold.”

She walked by the two men to the stairs. In a few minutes she heard them go out, and from where she stood drying her hair she saw them going along the boardwalk past the Campions', their yellow oil clothes gaudy in the pigeon colors of the day. Barry walked fast, as if he had a time dock to punch. Bennett was in no hurry, he kept looking around him. She wished she hadn't met him. It put her at a disadvantage, because Barry worked for him and he owned this house. He had a right to come into it, and she could say nothing about it. And never before had she come face to face with anyone for whom Barry had worked.

She was drinking coffee and reading at the kitchen table when Barry came home. He took off his oil clothes in the entry and hung them up, then he came into the kitchen and sat down on the wood-box to take off his rubber boots. “Find the trouble in the engine?” she asked amiably, without looking up from her book.

He didn't speak and she became lost in her story again. His voice came at last as a deadly surprise, a tidy and quiet knife between the shoulder blades. “Have you washed one dish or hung up one thing or wiped off that stove since you came into the house a week ago?”

“Since when have you been so house-proud?”

“Is that what you call it when I'd like to ask a man in for a mug up and not find the house looking like a mare's nest? My God, I was never so ashamed in my life. Had to scratch some to find a clean cup, and if it hadn't been for his wife's cooking I'd have had nothing to offer him.”

She sat back in her chair and studied him. Whether it was the dull light from outside she couldn't tell, but his skin had a grayish tinge and there were harsh shadows around his nose and mouth that were new; at least she hadn't noticed them before. “
Jesus
,” he said softly. “Here's a house better than we've ever had, all done up bright and clean, and you turn the place into a pigsty. Why, Van? Just tell me why. What makes you so goddam perverse?”

“What I do in this house is my own business.”

“It's my business too. I'm supporting you, I've made more this week than I ever made in a month before. I got a right not to be shamed in the face and eyes of everybody here. On Water Street they were all trash. This is different.”

“What's different about it?” she demanded. “They make more money, but at least on Water Street I didn't have to dodge and hide all the time to keep people's noses out of my life! Did your boss tell you I was a lazy bitch and I'd better keep his house better, or else?”

“He never said a word. Nobody's said anything but what's friendly,” he protested. “But how long before they catch on to the way you go scooting out around the island in all kinds of weather like the law was after you? How long before they wonder if you've got anything else to wear but those pants and sneakers and that goddam raincoat? So help me, I'll tear that thing up into rags and burn it some day before you're out of bed.”

She laughed and turned her back on him. His feet hit the floor behind her and he clutched her shoulder. “When are you going to start acting like a human being instead of a fugitive from a crazy house?”

“Take your hands
off
.”

After a minute he did, and sighed heavily. “All right, I know how you hate that. But when you turn your back on me, that's what
I
hate, Van, and I've got a right to hate something, don't I? It don't have to be all on your side.”

She pretended to ignore him, but the words on the page were senseless marks. “What do you have to have before you'll do your part out here?” he asked her in misery. “Just tell me, will ye? You can have the handling of the money, send off and get yourself all the clothes you want, magazines, books even—”

She shut her eyes and expelled a long loud breath. “I've done my part. I said I'd come, that's all. Nothing else. If none of the women get in here they won't know what a dirty house I keep. And if you don't bring any more men in for mug-ups, they won't know I don't spend my days cooking the way their perfect slaves do. If I don't go to any of their damned sewing circles and suppers they won't know what I wear. It's as simple as that.”

He came around to face her, flushed and wild. “But it's different now! We're living among decent people, we got a chance to be respectable for once!”

“What do you want for dinner?” she asked, looking back at her book.

“I don't want any dinner.” He went into the living room and threw himself down on the couch. She knew how he lay with his head buried in his arms. She used to wonder what he was thinking when he lay like this, and would sometimes feel compassion or even guilt, but indifference was better. Besides, there was nothing more to discover about Barry—she knew it all before they'd been married a year.

She was hungry even if he wasn't. She made a thick sandwich with canned corned beef, took more coffee, and carried the food upstairs. She settled herself in bed with a book, and after a while she heard Barry kicking the cartons and swearing, and then he's slammed out. When his footsteps had died away, a wonderful velvety silence settled down. The rain had stopped, and there was no wind. The harbor was silvery and still; only the wakes of home coming boats sent small delicate waves washing against the shores for a little while. Whenever the stillness returned it was with a new profundity.

The house was free of the mocking waves of light, and darkness pooled undisturbed in the corners under the eaves, creeping out into the room like soundless water sliding over flat sands that glimmered faintly in twilight. For the first time since Water Street she was wrapped in the security she had known there. She read, slept, waked in delicious safety to deeper darkness, slept again; woke to know it was really night and she was alone in the bed, alone in the house. She didn't know how she knew that—it was simply one of the facts of which she was certain. Carefully, she didn't rouse herself enough to wonder what time it was or where Barry was, but slipped into dark sleep again.

She awoke from a dream in which she was saying to someone, “I wonder if Lazarus really wanted to be hauled out into life again, blinking and dazed and stared at.” She knew in the instant of waking that she was thinking of herself as Lazarus, for she lay blinking and dazed in a room she was positive she had never seen before. The white curtains and the blue-sprigged paper, the scent of cold coffee and stale corned beef so close to her face, the unpleasant constriction of the clothes in which she had slept—they were all alien and hostile.
She
was alien also. Her heart seemed to plunge about sickeningly under her ribs, into her stomach, and up into her throat. Sweat sprang out on her body; she thought she was going to vomit. She got frantically out of bed and saw through the window Western Harbor Point and the breakwater washed bronze and rose with the sunrise. A boat was going out by the breakwater, and the man was putting on his oil clothes, now and then touching the wheel.

It was Bennett's Island out there, and she was Anna. Annie.
Vanessa
. She said it aloud, in a hoarse dry whisper.

A door shut downstairs, followed by the unmistakable thumping of rubber boots on hard ground. Barry was going out. She heard his voice exchanging greetings with Terence Campion, who soon appeared on his own wharf, dinner box under his arm, and went down the ladder to his skiff. She crouched at the edge of the bed and watched Campion row out to his mooring, using the quick short strokes of the professional fisherman.

She felt filthy for sleeping in her clothes, and the room smelled of the uneaten food. She flung the bedclothes back over the foot and opened the windows, breathing deeply the cold oceany air. Carrying the tray of food downstairs, she wondered how long she had slept. It had been noon when she'd gone to bed. How could I have slept like that? she asked in frightened awe. How do I know this is the day after yesterday? It could be two days after. This set up the panicky lunging of her heart again until she realized that Barry would have been scared if she'd slept through a day, and wouldn't have left her alone. That would really have been a treat for the neighbors! she thought, trying for humor but not successfully.

She pulled off her clothes and washed herself roughly in cold water direct from the cistern, and rubbed her skin with a coarse towel until it hurt. When she was through she ran upstairs naked and put on clean underwear, jeans, and an unironed shirt of Barry's. She hadn't dried her sneakers yesterday, and didn't own another pair, so she put on thick woolen socks and Barry's moccasins. She brushed her teeth with brutal vigor, wondering how Lazarus's mouth had tasted, then loosed her pony tail and brushed her hair as if the act were a form of mortification. When her scalp was smarting and her eyes watering, she fastened the long mane tightly back, glad of the discomfort for something to anchor her to reality.