She awoke at daybreak, aching from her tense sleep, but hungry and energetic. She got up and looked out at the harbor. She could just make out the start of a line of net floats spilling from an orange dory that nuzzled the rocks below the lawn.
Barry was asleep on the sitting-room couch. She moved quietly around the kitchen, making percolator coffee and oatmeal. Barry liked oatmeal, and she felt an affectionate indulgence toward him this morning. Until now whenever she set the table she had perversely ignored the inexpensive but vivid set of dishes in the cupboard, and used the few mismatched plates and mugs they’d brought with them. This morning she used the matching set. If he should ever come in when they were eating, he would see that she was not slovenly about serving the meals.
Barry came out rubbing his face hard with both hands, squinting against the sunrise shining in over the sink. “I smelled that coffee while I was dreaming, and thought I was in heaven. Hey, what’s this?”
“I wish I had some brown sugar for it.”
“Never mind, this looks damn good anyway.” He started to sit down and she said, “Wash first. You’re not living aboard a boat.”
“Sure, Marm.” He laughed and gave her a slap on the rear as he passed. It was a measure of her new mood that she didn’t spring back at him like an enraged cat. He washed noisily, and when he emerged from the towel he looked clear-eyed and young. “It was so late when I got in I didn’t want to wake you up so I turned in on the couch. We stopped off the harbor last night.”
“You slept in your clothes, I see. I’m glad you took your boots off.”
“I almost kept ’em on, scales and all. I was some bushed. But we figger we’ve got about twelve hundred bushels out there. Owen’s not going to call up for the carrier to come after this lot; we’ll share it out for bait.”
She sat down opposite him with a dish of oatmeal. “Who else went after the herring?”
“Well, Owen’s the cap’n. He came over to the store about dusk, trying to raise his crew. That’s Phil, and Rob Dinsmore—he’s Owen’s man anyway—and Charles Bennett’s boy Hugo. Well, Hugo was courting over to Brigport, so I got the chance to go.” He was jaunty with the prestige of it, but she let that pass for once. So Owen hadn’t mentioned coming to the house first. She felt again the visceral excitement that was half-pleasant and half-sickening. Barry’s voice faded out as if on a radio and then strengthened again as she tried to listen to him. We’re going to salt down my part in this fish house. When I start going by myself I’ll do everything, like the gear and boat was my own.”
“When do you start by yourself?”
“Next time we go to haul. We’re shifting pots today.” He was delighted with her attention, and talked and talked as greedily as he swallowed his food. She listened kindly, protecting the mood in which she had awakened.
“Well, I’ve got to get moving,” he said at last. “Any coffee left there I can take?”
“Plenty, and I’ll make some sandwiches.” She got out a couple of lobsters and opened them. He watched her, tipped back in his chair and smoking. “You know something, Van?” he said diffidently.
“Not much.” She gave him a quick smile. “What?”
“There’s no reason now why you can’t send off to the catalog for some new clothes. Them shirts of mine don’t do much for you, and they got some real nice things you’d look good in. Not that you don’t look good in almost anything you put on, except that goddam raincoat.”
She wrapped sandwiches and put them in his dinner box. “Well, maybe I’ll think about it,” she humored him. “You haven’t got so many shirts that we can divide them, anyway, the way I hate washing and ironing.”
He was pleased by her response and rushed on. “And get yourself a couple of dresses besides pants and shirts. You know those kind with the tight top and full skirts?”
She looked over her shoulder at him and saw him grinning, a little red and overheated as if by lascivious thoughts. “I’m not the type,” she teased him.
“Sure you are!” he blustered. “You’re a woman, ain’t ye? They’ll be having dances pretty soon and you want something nice to wear. I’ll be blasted if I can see how anybody can do a Lady of the Lake in one of them straight-up-and-down nightshirts that looks like a grain bag stitched up.”
That was Barry, pushing his luck and talking about dances. She said indifferently, “I’ll see.”
“Well, anyway, you can do with some new slacks,” he said, more subdued. “See if they got some like those of Mrs. Mark’s you had on the other day. Pick out something for me too, huh?”
It was crafty of him, but she could forgive him that today, even while knowing how he’d tell the other men that the wife liked to pick out his clothes for him.
When he had gone she took the bedclothes off the couch and hung them out in the yard to air.
“Hi!” It had happened at last. Kathy Campion was coming across the wet grass, her blue eyes sure of welcome. “Look, I’m not pushy—well, maybe I am—but how’ll you know you can use my washing machine if I don’t tell you?”
Be ordinary, Vanessa warned herself. You need protective coloring. “Thanks,” she said in a friendly if not effusive manner. “But so far I’ve only got a few things to wash, and I’d just as soon do them by hand, the cistern water is so soft.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Kathy lingered, hugging herself against the chill that raised gooseflesh on her arms. “I haven’t had a chance to ask you how you like it out here.”
“I like it a lot,” said Vanessa. “It’s so good to be out of the city with spring coming that I can’t seem to stay in the house.”
“Oh, I know what you mean!” Her fervent and puppyish responses would be wearing. “Most of us feel like that. We couldn’t stand living anywhere else. Well, there’s one who doesn’t, but it might be because she’s so young.”
Dying for me to ask who, and then we’ll move inside for a nice kaffee-klatsch, Vanessa thought, but was surprised when Kathy bubbled on, “Well, if I don’t get back, my kids will be fixing their own breakfast, and they’d eat chocolate-coated herring if they could manage it.” She ran back in her wet sneakers and Van called after her, “Thank you!” Kathy waved and went in.
Barry would be proud, Van thought wryly. I sound so goddam neighborly and housewifely and every other stupid thing I can think of . . . But it had been necessary; a great many things had now become necessary.
She started a chowder with the rest of the lobsters, and then sat down with coffee and a cigarette. Instantly, and without any seeming wish on her part, she began reliving last night. She shut her eyes so that she could see him clear against the dark, and felt under her fingers the structure of big nose and jaw and cheekbone; the brown skin would feel burning hot against her cold palms. Suddenly she felt certain that she would one day know these things and more, that there was no escape.
You sound, she told herself cynically, exactly like Maggie Dinsmore. She got up and found the mail-order catalog. It had been so long since she’d bought anything but sneakers and jeans that the vivid pages of styles and colors, the directions on how to make the correct measurements, made her painfully nervous. Still, Barry’s remark stayed with her. Those shirts of mine don’t do much for you. They made her conspicuous, that’s all they did for her; they made her a white blackbird among the nonfreaks. She had to cease to be someone to whose every habit and gesture they would be acutely sensitive.
Finally, made a rough selection of clothes to choose from; with a small derisive smile she marked a couple of full-skirted dresses. Then she checked off some men’s clothes for Barry to look at.
After that, she walked restlessly around the rooms. She found herself coming back again and again to the front windows, and realized that she was acting like the women she despised, waiting for the men to come in. Oh well, she thought, I’m not all gone yet; at least it’s not my own husband I’m looking for. In the afternoon, she went upstairs to change her clothes. Now that she had decided to get something new to wear, she regarded what she had with loathing.
Nothing suited her, and suddenly she became despondent and sank down on the bed in the tumble of clothing. The fiery energy that had driven her all day seemed to have consumed itself. Tears gathered in her eyes, and slid from the outer corners down past her cheekbones to her ears. She didn’t know why she was crying. “Except that I’m miserable,” she said aloud in a cracked voice. “That’s a simple fact, isn’t it? Like being black or white or crippled or tubercular.”
She heard a boat coming in and bounded off the bed. She dressed fast then, not caring what she put on as long as she could be around the harbor when Barry came home, a woman who walked down on the wharf to greet her husband. Her hair was full of electricity when she brushed it. It flew out from her head, lay in a tough lustrous web across her mouth, and wound itself around her hand and the brush. Finally, she got it gathered up and the elastic on.
When she left the house at last she felt hot and nervous. The youngest child next door was playing in the path and she hurried around him as if he were a rock. There were more boats coming in, the harbor danced with their crossing wakes, and she wondered feverishly which one was Owen Bennett’s. Supposing he’d come in, sold his lobsters, and gone home while she’d been struggling with her damned hair?
She saw Mrs. Foss Campion taking in her wash, but got by without being noticed. At the harbor beach she stopped and shaded her eyes, trying to see across the flashing water. An outburst behind her made her jump, and she saw the children spilling across the field from the schoolhouse, exploding into the day like a box of fireworks into which someone had dropped a lighted match. She hurried on, around to the front of Philip Bennett’s fish house.
Here, hidden among the rows of traps, she sat down on a crate and put her back against the old gray shingles, and shut her eyes. She was out of breath, as if she’d been running for miles. The sun was hot on her lips and eyelids, the shingles warm through her jersey, the worn dry wood of the crate satiny under her palms. She grew calmer.
When she opened her eyes again there were three boats around Mark Bennett’s lobster car, and Barry’s small agile figure stood on the bow of one. Someone laughed; she was sure it was Owen, though she couldn’t sort out the other figures on the car. She walked around to Mark’s wharf, and reached it just as Owen Bennett’s boat left it.
White Lady IV was the name on her stern. Bennett’s Island. No Maine after it. It could have been a separate country. It’s a wonder they don’t have their own flag, she thought, venomous with disappointment . . . He wasn’t heading out of the harbor to go around the Eastern End and home, but across to the other wharves. He didn’t look back to where she stood against Mark’s shed. Idling toward Nils Sorensen’s wharf, he took the gaff and pulled the boat in alongside the spilings, made her fast, and went up the ladder onto the wharf and disappeared between the fish houses.
“Hi, Beautiful!” Barry shouted from the car, raucous with pride and euphoria. “Hey, Rob, you met my wife yet?” Rob Dinsmore, Maggie’s husband, was stocky with thick hands and a mild, almost stupid face. “No, but I heard about her,” he said in a twanging, upcountry drawl. “I guess everybody knows about her hauling the young one out of the drink. Maggie’s talked about nothing else.”
The other men, besides Mark, were Philip Bennett and Terence Campion. She answered their greetings with a nod and a faint smile, but since Owen had disappeared she was furious with Barry for being so loud and cocky on the car. The others were laughing at him, she was sure of it.
She went abruptly back up the wharf, but when she reached the path she walked slowly, not knowing what to do next. If she had to give up without seeing him, she’d run off somewhere or go to bed, anything to get through the rest of the day. Then she saw him across the road from Nils’ fish house. He stopped to speak to a couple of young boys who had a great deal to tell him, then headed up past Philip’s toward the Sorensen house.
She walked briskly in the same direction, waving to Maggie on the way. She was a woman out for a call, and no one could think anything different. She passed between two clumps of budding lilacs, and a black-and-white collie came to meet her. His benign eyes reassured her, like a good-luck omen. He walked beside her, and she kept her hand lightly on his neck as she approached the door. As she knocked, the action seemed duplicated within herself in the now-familiar rhythm of delight and terror.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” Joanna pulled her in. “Isn’t this nice!”
“You said I could borrow a book,” Van said hurriedly. “At least I think it was you.”
“It doesn’t matter as long as you’re here. Come on in and browse.”
She knew at once that Owen wasn’t in the house. Joanna was alone. She fought to hide her disappointment behind a set smile, and when Joanna turned to lead the way into the sitting room she was desperately tempted to run out. But she could not. She was committed now.
“I was just wishing somebody would drop in for a cup of coffee,” Joanna’s voice came back to her, “I baked this morning too. You’re the victim.”
“I’m afraid my feet may be muddy.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Nobody else does. Owen’s just tramped through here in rubber boots. Short cut to Charles’s, he calls it. Well it is, I suppose, but I’m glad everybody else doesn’t think so.”
She could make an honest comment here. “I thought Charles lived in the Homestead up the rise.”
“He does. But you can go through the woods behind the barn here and across the lower meadow, so it’s a little shorter. Well, here are the books. Take as many as you like, and I’ll go make some coffee.”
Van sat on the edge of a chair and stared blindly at the book-shelves. Out in the kitchen Joanna set out cups and saucers. Van tried to read titles, but bindings and dust jackets were so many abstract designs. She took two finally, without knowing what they said, and when she heard Joanna’s approaching footsteps she quickly opened one of the books and pretended to be leafing through it.
“I hope you like that one,” Joanna said from behind her. “It’s one of my favorites. What’s the other one?” Silently Vanessa held it up.
“Now that one I’d like to discuss with you. It’s the darndest thing I ever read, but I couldn’t put it down. Then I couldn’t get anyone else to read it and talk about it with me. My daughter gave it to me for my birthday.”
Say something, you idiot, Van commanded herself. She nodded toward the photographs on the bookcase. “That youngster?”
Joanna laughed. “That’s Linnea and she’s only fifteen, in her first year in high school. No, my oldest, Ellen.” She went across the room and brought back a good studio portrait of a girl in her early twenties. Van took it in her hands for something to engage her clammy fingers.
“She’s good-looking. Better than pretty. I mean, she’ll always be good-looking, even when she’s eighty. It’s the bones.”
“That’s what I think too. I’m not a bit modest about my kids. Ellen’s been through art school and she’s teaching outside Boston.”
“She seems to have her father’s coloring.”
“She does, but Nils isn’t her father, if that’s what you’re thinking. Come on out into the sunporch and have some coffee.”
“You were married before, then,” she ventured.
“Yes, when I was nineteen.” She lifted her cup. “Ouch. Been near the fire. I wasn’t divorced, I was widowed. Alec was drowned one June and Ellen was born the next January.”
A tremor went through Van’s hand and she put down her cup. “I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly. “It must have been terrible.”
“It was,” said Joanna. “It was over twenty years ago but I can remember exactly how it felt. I can see Stevie standing there in his wet clothes looking up at me. They’d sent him to tell me, you see, and poor Stevie, he was only sixteen . . . I don’t think he’s ever forgotten it either. Or Owen,” she said absently, lifting her cup again. “Sometimes when I think of Alec it’s strange to realize that I’m a woman past forty, but Alec always stays the same, a boy. It shakes me, sometimes. Ellen is as old now as her father was when he died.” Matter-of-factly she added, “I saw him. I went straight down there, to the old boat shed by the harbor beach.”
“I don’t see how anybody survives anything like that,” Vanessa said. She wished she were huddled in her room, walled safely away from this.
“I didn’t know how I was going to, but I did. And look what people go through in wars. The concentration camps, for instance. It’s astonishing what you can stand.” She smiled. “But small things can do a lot of damage. You can make the big effort, be gallant, hold your chin up, and then some tiny thing knocks it all down. You come across a glove he lost one time, a note he made of something he wanted over at Brigport. And to see his violin gathering dust . . . I’d been married to Nils a good while before I could stand hearing somebody play fiddle tunes that Alec used to play.”
“But you got over it.”
“Yes, I got over it.”
Van shook her head and Joanna said, “What’s the matter?”
“I couldn’t. I’d want to die too.” The words spurted out and she was ashamed.
“You mean if you lost Barry. Well, I hope you never do, but if you did, well, you’re not weak.” She got up. “Let’s have some hot coffee. I don’t know why I told you all that. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone for years, not since Steve’s wife first came here and told me about her first husband. He was killed in the Pacific during the war . . . There must be something about you that draws people out. You don’t make small talk, for one thing.” As she came back with the coffeepot she said, “You have beautiful hair.”
“I’m going to cut it,” said Van at once.
“Oh, why?”
“At my age a pony tail looks idiotic.”
“What does age matter, if you can get away with it? Liza and I were saying the other day that you could. You’re tall and you’ve got a face that can stand that sort of—how would you describe it?”
“Scraped-back look, Barry calls it.” They both laughed. She’d cut it tonight, or earlier; she could hardly wait to get home and do it. They were commenting on it. “Besides, it’s getting too heavy and hot. Sometimes it makes my head ache.”
“I suppose that’s the drawback. Look, while I think of it, will you come to our sewing circle on Friday? We have it at night so Laurie can come.” Van’s expression must have changed in some way, because Joanna said as an explanation, “Owen’s wife, you know. She teaches school. I forget you don’t know all about the place yet.”
Someone who consistently refused to mix was conspicuous. “All right,” she said reluctantly, “but I haven’t anything to sew.”
“I’ll give you something to do. We’re making things for a fair over at Brigport this summer, and for once we’ve started early enough.”
“Well, I’ll do what I can,” Van heard herself saying in this fantasy that had become her life. “I’d better go home now and think about supper. I can hardly wait to start in on these books. Thanks for the coffee and conversation.” It sounded unnatural and jerky to her, but Joanna didn’t appear to notice. She walked with Van to the end of the spruce windbreak and they stood by the lilacs. “It’s spring,” said Joanna dreamily, touching a fat bud. “These are white. You have some around your house, you know, the purple ones.”
“On Water Street I had lilies of the valley.” Again she was undone by the sudden arterial spurt of words. “I don’t know what’s become of them. They’re tearing down the house.” Her face burned. But Joanna, stroking the bud, said, “Laurie’s got a nice big bed of them. She’ll give you some, I’m sure.”
That would be nice. . . . Now I have to go.”
“I’m glad you came in, and I’ll see you Friday if not before.”
Van gave her a brief smile and left. She wanted to laugh at the spectacle of herself; each thing she had done, borrowing books, sitting down for coffee, holding a personal conversation, promising to work for a fair, only added to the incredibility. She could feel her mouth twitching with held-back laughter.
“Hi, Mrs. Barton!” the Dinsmore children chirped at her, and she looked solemnly down at them and said, “Lawks a mercy on us, this be none of I.”
She laughed at their faces and went on, knowing exactly how the old lady had felt. The little housewifely talk of plants on the end had been the final joke. But was it? Her private picture of the fresh green spears and minute buds crushed into muddy death was oddly confused with the image of the drowned boy.
But she had been diverted in spite of herself, and when she reached home she was less feverish in her activity. It was dark before the men were done with handling the fish, getting it ashore and salting it down in the bait butts. Barry’s was the last, and they worked by lantern light in the fish house. Her uneasiness returned. The knowledge that Owen was only a few yards away exerted a powerful influence on her. Once she found herself at the front door, holding to the knob, and arguing passionately with herself. There was no reason why a woman shouldn’t go across the road to tell the men she had the coffeepot on. But she couldn’t make herself open the door. It wasn’t to be like this. She had to wait.
Barry came in at last. Herring scales glittered in his eyebrows and on his skin. His boots were spangled with them, and he brought with him the cold deep-sea scent of fresh herring. He had cleaned a dozen large ones, and he wrapped them in wax paper and put them in the refrigerator.
“I’ve got hot water for you,” she told him. “Want to wash up before you eat?”
“I guess so, if I don’t fall into the sink.” Leaning against the wall he tiredly kicked off his boots. He took off his shirt and went to the sink.
She wasn’t hungry, but she told him she had eaten earlier; she sat down opposite him and sewed buttons on his shirts while he ate and listened to news on the radio. It was a perfectly ordinary scene. She imagined a secret onlooker saying, You see, she’s just like any woman.
“That’s a good mess of bait we’ve got here,” Barry said when he’d finished eating. “Give me corned herring instead of brim any time. I just hope Cap’n Owen waits a couple of nights before he wants me to do it again. He never gets tired. Phil kept telling him to take it easy.”
“You still think he’s a wild one?” She didn’t look up from her needle.
“The way he acts proves it. I’ve seen that kind before.” He gave her a wise wink and nod. “He may be married, sure he loves his wife and kids, but he’s in his prime yet and he keeps thinking of the old days when he was laying ’em left and right.”
He snickered enviously. “He’s trying so damn hard to be good, he’s like to kill himself at it. But I like the bastard, I sure do.” He yawned till his eyes ran, and headed for the stairs. At the foot he stopped and looked back at her. “That was a good supper, sweetie. Finest kind. Place looks good too. I wanted to let you know I saw it, but I’ll be damned if I know how, my eyes are some bleary.” He went upstairs. After a few minutes she went and listened, and heard his heavy breathing. She went back to the kitchen, and pulled all the shades, took off her jersey, pinned a towel around her neck, and began to cut her hair.