The Seasons Hereafter (8 page)

“Well, I never!” the girl gasped. “
Imagine
! And you know something, I bet that's what my dream meant, only I thought it was one of
my
young ones about due to fall overboard. I ain't been letting them out of the dooryard!” She caught up with Vanessa at the foot of the path. Her freckled bony face was brilliant. “You were
meant
to be there. Something made you go there—you was sent, sure as preachin'. I know about these things.”

“Now, Maggie,” said Mark, “you be careful about what spirits you haul into this pure atmosphere. You might drag in some bad actors on that beam of yours.”

“You laugh, Mark, but you know the truth just the same.” She tapped his chest with her finger. “It's all right, I can stand being laughed at. I'm not one of them dead-serious ones. I've seen some that was crazy as coots.”

“Mebbe we better drag for that lean pork, my girl.” He winked at Vanessa.

“I can't remember what I wanted,” she said abruptly. “I'll be back later, or Barry will.” As she turned and walked away from them she almost bumped into a young girl who gazed at her from heavily made-up eyes that seemed to fill half a short and pallid face. Her hair was done up high on rollers and wrapped in a scarf.

“Hi,” she said indifferently and passed on, swinging her large handbag. She wore an immense hairy cerise sweater and black stretch slacks. She was like an apparition from Water Street, an affirmation that it still existed.

Behind Van Maggie exclaimed, “Hello, Gina! When are you going to stop in and have that cup of coffee with me?”

“Well, here's Merry Sunshine in person,” Mark said.

Van walked faster and faster, as if something inside her were going to give way if she didn't get inside her own door as fast as possible. Once she was there she leaned against the entry wall, panting and dry-mouthed. “I can't stay here,” she whispered. “I can't. They'll be the death of me.”

She remembered the frenzy in which she had cleaned the kitchen this morning, but it seemed like a very long time ago. The sun had moved away from the window sill where she had set her dishes, and they were now ordinary and a little pathetic. She looked down at the clothes she wore; the illusion of elegance set off in the Bennetts' mirror had been as deceptive as the rainbows flashing in the sauce dishes and illuminating the amber glass hen. She dropped her wet clothes and sodden shoes and ran upstairs, where she got out of the borrowed things in shuddering haste, and crawled naked into bed.

B
arry didn't get home until late afternoon and by then she was up and dressed, with supper ready, the borrowed underwear washed, all Helmi's things put into a box ready to be returned to her. Barry was proud and excited, gazing at her with merry incredulity, as if she had changed from a toad to a princess. He'd been ashamed of her when he left in the morning; she knew that he had probably hated her. But he had come in to find out at the lobster car that he had a wife whom everyone else admired. He could hardly believe it when Mark said, “That's some woman you've got, Barry.”

He repeated it to Vanessa again and again, taking new fire each time from the very sound of it. He told her also what Philip, Charles, and Stephen Bennett had said; what Foss Campion, Matt Fennell, Rob Dinsmore, and Nils Sorensen had said. He reported each significant nod, glance, or turn of phrase that had occurred when the boats gathered at the lobster car.

“You're
in
, Van,” he told her in triumph. “Not but they all wanted to be friendly before, but you acted like you didn't think anybody was good enough for you. Now it's different . . . they know you're alive, they know you're real.”

“Did anybody interview the cat?” she asked him.

He didn't know what she was driving at, but he was pleased because she was talking to him and the house was clean. “That's a damn' good fish hash you turned out. I've never eaten anybody else's fish hash was any good. Where'd you get the pickles?”

“They were in the cupboard.” Poor Barry. In these intervals of detachment she knew that cruel things had been done to him. Now he was as giddy with joy as a child at Christmas—not every child, not the child Anna, for instance—but she wished she had never gone out of the house this morning, at least not across the harbor and down onto the wharf, to be drawn into this vortex of people. But the alternative would have been a dead child, and she couldn't honestly say that did not matter to her. She studied the tablecloth, tracing a flower with her finger. “Come on, walk around the harbor with me,” Barry said. “I've got a chess game on with Nils Sorensen. You know his wife.”

“Spend an evening with
her
?” She laughed aloud and Barry looked hurt.

“I suppose if she ran a whorehouse you'd find her real interesting company. What's the matter with them around here, too goddam respectable?”

He slammed the door when he went out. She stacked the dishes in the sink and took the Aladdin lamp upstairs. It made the room too warm and she opened the windows. There was a low hum of generators as those who had power plants prepared to watch television; it sounded as if the island itself were warming up engines, getting ready to voyage out into the dream-world of stars and black ocean.

Much later, when the Aladdin smoked up and she had to turn it down to let the mantel clear itself of caked soot, she got out of bed to kneel by the window with her head and shoulders out. It was a soft night and sometime earlier the generators had stopped. Now from the cranberry swamp behind the house the peep frogs were singing; she used to hear them as she lay in bed when she was a child and longed to be out in the spring dark. Now there was no one's permission to ask, but now, alas, she knew there was nothing out there for her.

The lights around the harbor went out almost as on a signal, and then she heard Barry coming along the boardwalk; whistling a tune his father used to play on the fiddle for square dances at the Grange Hall. She blew out the lamp so he would think when he came to bed that she was asleep, and lay in the dark trying for ancient magic.
There was this girl, and nobody knew who she was
. . . . But it had become black magic, conjuring up the dreadful awakening and the fear that the madwoman who wrote the postcards might have passed something horrible on to her.

She was almost glad when Barry came upstairs. He was in his stocking feet, and undressed quietly. He could be as stealthy as a cat when he chose. She wondered if he were being considerate, or if he was still too mad with her to want to speak. After he had got cautiously into bed and settled down she said in a normal voice, “Who won the game?”

After a moment's silence he said, “I got one, and Nils got two. He's one of these deep guys. A real thinker.”

“That's all he could be, living in that family. He'd never get a chance to be a talker.”

Barry ignored that. “Jo was real disappointed because you didn't come. I had to make up a good story about you taking a chill, and then she got worried about you.”

“If she comes poking around here tomorrow with a bowl of calf's-foot jelly, I'll tell her the truth,” said Van. “What you said earlier, that she's too goddam respectable, among other things.”

Barry chuckled as if she'd been witty. He was determined to avoid a fight, still warmed by the praise of her act. “Talk about respectable. Owen came in.
That's
a real wild son of a bitch for you.”

“You mean there's somebody in this paradise who raises hell once in a while? All the sweetness and light must drive him to it.”

“Oh, he talks respectable enough, and he's a family man. In fact he had one of his kids with him, little girl twelve or so.” Barry's voice trailed off, he yawned, and then said, “But you can see it right in his eye. Like something sleeping in a cage.”

Barry could still surprise her after all. His words evoked the tiger sprawled behind bars, the gold of his coat dull and the black stripes dusty, the eyes extinguished. As she watched, the cage door swung gently open and the tiger awoke. The eyes came alive in the great mask, and the dusty fur took on the burnish of vitality as the long body stretched out in the leap to freedom. It was as if the tiger had landed here in this room on his huge pads; lying in the dark beside Barry she saw the fiery splendor of the eyes. She quoted aloud,

“Huh?” Barry mumbled. He turned over suddenly and put his arm across her and hugged her. The glory was gone, leaving a deeper blackness than before. There was no glory, never any glory. “Christ, I've been proud of you today,” he muttered. “If we ever needed anything to put us in solid with them you've done it, hauling that little tyke out of the drink.”

“I wish to God I'd let him drown!” she exclaimed. She rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed. “Or else never walked around to the wharf at all just in time to be a damn heroine! The last thing I'd ever want is to be in solid with the Bennetts. I
hate
them.”

“You hate them for having something.” His voice was dry and cold. “Well, we've got a chance to have something for the first time. I can buy this house and a boat. We'll have a place where we belong.”

“Not me. I'll never belong here.”

“You'll never belong anywhere, then! You've always got it in your head that you're a state kid. You think it sticks out all over you like salt rheum and makes folks shy off like you're contagious? You're the one that shies off. They don't know you're a state kid, and even if they did they wouldn't care.”

“They're too wrapped up in themselves. It's a wonder they all don't marry each other to keep the bloodlines pure.”

“Oh, don't talk so foolish. Are we going to have a little something or not?” His fingers felt along her back, hooked inside the elastic of her pajamas. She sprang away from the touch and stood by the window. “I knew it,” he groaned. “What's turned me so damn repulsive all at once? I don't know what I've done to deserve this, but it sure must have been something pretty bad.”

He stumbled out of the room, hitting his foot against a chair leg and letting out an outraged howl which she knew expressed more than the pure physical pain in his toes. Gasping and swearing, he felt his way downstairs. She stood by the window a long time, shivering until the tremors were so great she could hardly stand. She knew they were like Barry's howl, that they came from something else besides externals.

She stayed in bed until Barry had gone in the morning. He had never been so quarrelsome on Water Street, but it was a wholly different condition here. If he'd only stop this idiotic insistence on appearances, they'd achieve some sort of peace again. She sat up and watched him leave the harbor in a boat called
Kestrel
. He was steering while Philip Bennett pulled on his oil clothes. Barry had talked to her about the boat with love and lust, not with envy, because at first he couldn't imagine himself ever having the money to possess such a boat, built to order and fitted out with everything to turn lobstering into a gentleman's profession. She'd been repelled by the lack of resentment in his radiant account of how the diesel started at the touch of a button, how he had called the mailboat by the radiotelephone to find out if Phil's new fathometer was aboard, and how the new trap-hauler made hauling so much easier. Now he was beginning to believe that he too could be a gentleman-lobsterman some day. As if they would ever let him. The unrealistic Barry, fattening on hope, angered her more than the unresentful one. She supposed he was happy now as he took
Kestrel
out of the harbor, unless he was allowing thoughts of his wife to spoil his pleasure. If he does he's a fool, she thought.

When
Kestrel
disappeared around the breakwater she watched other boats leave the harbor in the cloudy sunrise. She wondered which one belonged to Owen Bennett, and as she thought his name she raw the tiger again, free now, the muscles flowing under his coat as he padded through the light and shade in a jungle that proliferated richly within the walls of this house.

The clouds outside were dissolved by a northwest breeze and the sun was strong and warm. She took a sandwich and a book and got away before Dandelion-Head could catch her, or the fat florid object that had rapped and beckoned so horribly yesterday. You don't really have to build a better mousetrap, she thought. You find a child in a puddle and pick him out. Then you lose all your rights as a private person.

Eventually, lulled by the sun's warmth and the soporific swash of water a little way out of sight, she became absorbed in her book. After a time she was aroused by a penetrating chill; she was surrounded by complete shadow, and a freshening wind was blowing through the spruce boughs. It was late and she hadn't known time was passing . . . she hadn't even eaten her sandwich. She saw that she hadn't read much of her book and realized that she must have slept part of the time, and this gave her a small twinge of fright.