The Seasons Hereafter (6 page)

She put water on to heat for coffee, and a panful for dishes. While she waited she began setting the kitchen to rights. She couldn't even sit down to drink her coffee, but kept picking up the mug for a swallow and then going on to something else. She finished unpacking the boxes in which she and Barry had rummaged for what they wanted, then untied and unpacked the others. She ran up and down stairs, putting things in what she considered at this moment their proper places. There was Barry's .22 seven-shot rifle, a gift from his father on his twelfth birthday. He hadn't used it, or even had shells for it, for a long time, but he kept it clean and wrapped in an old flannel shirt. She hung it on two pegs in the sitting room that must have held other rifles in the past. She had the few books she'd hung onto during all their moves, their handful of necessary papers which she kept filed inside her
Anthology
of
British and American Poetry
; a box of oddments including the cheap jewelry given her as presents by foster parents and by Barry, an initialed handkerchief with a lacy edge tatted by Mrs. Bearse, an imitation jade cigarette holder, buttons, an empty perfume bottle she'd had for so long she couldn't remember not having it. The last ghost of scent had gone. She used to think it had belonged to her mother, but now she couldn't remember why she had ever thought so. Still she held on to it. There was also a thick gold watch that Barry treasured because it had belonged to his great-grandfather. It didn't work, and they'd never had the money or the interest to take it to a jeweler and find out why.

In the last carton, wrapped in rough-dried shirts and work pants, were the objects she'd taken from Water Street. She'd found them when they'd moved in, hidden away in a corner of the attic that must have been too dark for the children who'd ransacked the rest of the house. She hadn't shown them to Burrage, for fear he'd insist on giving the relics to the heirs. She knew nothing of the value of such things, but these felt alive and responsive in her hands and she couldn't bear to part with them. Besides, since she had rescued them they were really hers. They comforted her now, as if she'd been able to bring fragments of the house's splendor with her; the green-flowered tureen with a lid, three square little glass sauce dishes that flashed rainbows when she washed them and set them in the sun, a small jug and sugar bowl, lilac-colored, with raised white figures that reminded her of a cameo brooch worn by someone in one of her foster homes. She couldn't remember the person or the house, only the brooch, and how she used to look at the cameo and long to run her finger over the miniature perfection of the profile. The intensity of that longing was remembered now like a flavor or a fragrance. The last treasure was an amber glass dish whose lid made it into a hen on a nest. She arranged them all on a sunny window sill and admired them for a few moments, drinking lukewarm coffee. Then she set to work on the dirty dishes, the grease-filmed teakettle, the two stoves. It came to her as she scoured that Barry would think he had prodded her into this, but she couldn't stop even for that; she was rushed on as if by a fire at her heels. She took the braided rugs out into the light wind and shook them till her arms ached.

“Hi there!” somebody called, and she jumped. The blonde girl laughed and waved from under her clotheslines.

“Hi,” Vanessa called back, and hurried into the house. Suddenly she was exhausted, but everything was done, upstairs and down. She was trembling and ravenous. She fried bacon and eggs and heated up two of Mrs. Philip's doughnuts, and carried a tray into the sunporch, where she ate by the windows. She was careful not to drop crumbs on the newly swept floor. As her trembling lessened, she was able to lean back and smoke a cigarette in something like peace.

Outside, the grass between the house and the shore was taking on a green shimmer. Sparrows ran over the rim of old rockweed and chips left on the turf from a winter storm. The changeable harbor seemed curiously empty and lifeless this morning in spite of the skiffs at the moorings and the gulls picking through the fresh wet weed on the ledges. It was as if an invisible tide had gone out with the men and wouldn't return until they did.

The children were in school, and one imagined the women static, transfixed in time until the men came home and gave them breath and significance again.

No wonder Barry's getting above himself, she thought wryly. This is a place for men, and he's drunk with the proposition. A new Barry is emerging and naturally the old Vanessa won't do.

He'd never before harassed her about being a solitary. Now it meant that she was crazy. How many times, in how many ways, had he flung it at her yesterday? She laughed aloud, and then an evil thing happened, choking the laughter off but leaving her with her mouth stretched open in a silent cry,
What if he's right?
The long sleep, the dream of Lazarus and the subtle terror of a small bright room not recognized and a self not known. It had lasted only a moment but it had happened; she couldn't deny it. What if it happened again?

She sprang up to escape, but where was the refuge from what lay in her head, what was implicit in her bones, the color of her eyes, the shape of her hands? As a child she used to wonder who her parents were, until she learned that it was a dangerous and futile sort of indulgence. A few times she had received a picture postcard from far off with a message scribbled in pencil and signed “Mama,” telling her that she would see her next Christmas, and to be a good girl. But next Christmas never brought her, or even a card.

“She would have come if she could, Anna,” Miss Foster said once. “I'm sure of that.”

“Do you know
her
?” She was eight then, and had not learned not to ask questions which adults would not or could not answer.

“No, I don't,” the visitor admitted. “We've tried to find her, Anna. Perhaps she won't let us find her because she's afraid. We do know your father is dead. He was a soldier and he died in the war.”

“If you don't know my mother, how do you know she really wants to see me?” Anna persisted. “If she likes me so much, why did she leave me with that woman and never come back?”

“When you grow up, Anna, you will know that sometimes people aren't responsible for their actions. They can be sick in their minds as well as their bodies. If your leg is hurt you can't walk well. If your mind is hurt you can't think well.”

“Is her mind hurt?”

“I don't know. It might be.”

Later, when Anna was at the Bearses' and beginning to be Vanessa in her own mind, after a woman in a book, Miss Foster said—trying to pin her down to some serious thinking about her future—“I hated those postcards that came for you, Anna, because as long as they came, you weren't adoptable. And yet we couldn't trace her by those cards and talk to her about releasing you.”

“Who'd ever have adopted me anyway?” the girl scoffed.

“You'd be surprised how many people are drawn to the sort of child you were. Well, that's all in the past now. You're almost grown-up and you can be a good-looking girl if you put your mind on it.” Her humorous despair took in the blue jeans and the stripped-back mane of thick ginger-colored hair. “What's more important, you're an intelligent girl with a great many capabilities. You can build a fine life for yourself.” She smiled. “I imagine you've given up the idea of being a lobster fisherman. Remember when you were twelve or so?”

“I'd be one if somebody'd stake me to a dory and traps.”

“I think you would, and do well at it too. If you were a boy there'd be some chance of it. But—” She shrugged, faintly regretful. “So you're raking blueberries this summer. That's fine. Toward the end of August we'll see about your clothes for school. Remember, if you get the marks I
know
you can get, there could be a scholarship at a business college for you, and that would be a really wonderful start.”

“Yes,” said Vanessa stolidly. Miss Foster was almost at the door before Van remembered her manners and unwound her legs from those of her chair and got up. Something bedeviled her. It was something she wanted to ask, yet could not frame the words fast enough, or bravely enough. Before she knew it the instant for asking had gone by, and she hadn't known how to break in later with the crude question, Did you ever find out about my mother? If she isn't dead, is she insane? Is she shut up in Bangor or Augusta?

T
hirteen years later, on Bennett's Island, Vanessa leaned her cheek against the cold glass and shut her eyes. What if my mother is, or was, insane? she wondered. Suppose that everything about me, all my ways of being different, all my ways of letting them know I don't give a damn, all my strangenesses that I'm so proud of—suppose everything is a warning that I could go insane too? One great signpost pointing to just one road. Does Barry know? Did his people know? Was that why they went wild when he said he had to marry me?

Then she shook herself like a dog coming out of the water, realizing Barry never could have kept anything like that to himself. No, he called her crazy because she wasn't like his mother and everybody else's wife. He was proud of her difference until it got in his way, and then he became ashamed and spiteful.

But if he sensed something . . . Was there any expert who could look at all the known facts of her life and say, “There walks a sick woman”? Could he prophesy that she would again sleep eighteen hours at a stretch or longer, and wake up not knowing who she was or where?

The pain of a bitten knuckle brought her up sharp. “Oh, damn it!” she said angrily and stamped out into the kitchen and opened the back door. The air was cold and she reached for something to put on, but when her hand grasped the black raincoat her fingers flew apart as if she had touched something foul. She ran upstairs for a light jacket of Barry's she'd just put away.

“I am not insane,” she said in a loud measured voice. “I am not eccentric. And I am not afraid of anyone.”

Next door the younger child was out alone, squat and sexless in warm clothes and cap. It gave Vanessa a long dispassionate blue stare as she passed. Rather you than your mother, Vanessa thought, walking a little faster. She knew that some day the mother would ambush her, and she felt like breaking into a run now, except that to be seen running would be another bad sign.

As she passed by the third fish house, she could see through an open door a man working at a bench. “Good morning!” he called, and she answered hastily, then jumped as from the house opposite there was a sharp rapping on a window. A stout red-faced woman beckoned and smirked at her from between ruffled curtains. “Oh,
hello
,” Vanessa mouthed back, waving and smiling with a sensation of horror as if she'd been caught naked and they wouldn't look away from her.

There was nothing after them for a while but the harbor beach and the marsh. Today she saw things she had been unable to see on her flight from the wharf that day; seine dories newly painted in buff and blue at the edge of the coarse grass, a graveyard of old hulls rotting beside a little pond, as harmonious with their back ground as the seine dories. A red-winged blackbird sprang into the air over the pond, flashing scarlet patches. A sandy road led up through the marsh toward a distant rise, away from the sea wall and the school, to where a long gray house and overshadowing barn stood against the dappled southeast sky. The Bennett homestead, of course. Nothing much at the harbor could have escaped that row of windows. Do all the Bennett descendants have to be born in a certain room to make them legitimate? But humor was no help. She felt too much in view of herself—too vulnerable—and hurried till a long shed hid her from the windows.

The beach was empty except for the gulls scavenging over the wet stones, and sparrows running about the litter of dry rockweed on the brow. The marsh gave off its own earthy essence in the strengthening warmth of the day. Standing quiet and alone suddenly pierced with pleasure by the Wash of sunlight on curled mossy shingles she wanted to cry out, Why can't this be enough? Was it a sign of mental derangement that she could repudiate people and find it enough, like the moment on Water Street when she stopped to look at her house?

She forced herself to walk on, trying for the complacency that had borne her along the broken pavements and into the hall to deal with Brig. She pinned her mind to wretched little details: vanilla, cheese, baking powder, paper napkins, dried beans. She tried to see the inside of the refrigerator and the cupboards, but she could not remember what they had been eating the last few days. She passed the other fish houses, the wharves close together and crowded with rows of new traps and old ones taken up to dry out, giving off the sweetish reek of the rotting vegetation that had grown on the laths in deep water. She heard a door shut, a dog barking, someone calling and a small child answering, a clatter of pails at the well, but no one confronted her, and she got around to the big wharf at last. Mark Bennett's store offered cover, but before she reached the door she heard a strong burst of laughter inside.

She went quickly through the long shed that covered part of the wharf and out into the open. The tide was low, and the lobster car was a long way down. She walked to the end and stood looking out past the end of Brigport toward the horizon.

She had come this far, but she was not sure that she could go into the store and hold her own with those people. Yet if she didn't go in she wouldn't be able to keep reaffirming her sanity to herself. Miserably she walked around the end of the wharf, trying to take deep breaths. One side of the wharf reached close to the static avalanche of yellowish rock that formed Western Harbor Point, and between the wharf spilings and the shaggy base of the point the low tide left a small pool of water that mirrored the sky. Like the lobster car on the other side, it was a long way down. She stood looking at part of herself reflected in silhouette against the luminous pallor overhead. The motion at the outer rim of her vision made her start nervously, and she saw a small boy in denim pants and jacket going down over the massive blocks of yellow ledge with an expression of determination. She responded instantly to his mood. For the moment he was like herself, a solitary, though he wouldn't be one for long. He might have been four years old.