She 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.
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?