On Saturday night they went to the Dinsmores’ for baked beans and homemade brown bread Rob’s round mild face was flushed and smiling perpetually with shyness and pleasure. Mag was excited, flashing between stove and table like a goldfish in its globe. Barry was easy with them, and they felt perfectly at ease with him; he was one of Rob’s kind, the well-meaning but inadequate kind who could never be his own man. Whenever he attempted it, he would attract disasters to him as a magnet attracts iron filings. Watching the two of them tonight, expanding in each other’s company, intensely absorbed in lobstering talk, she thought, This is the only way they feel safe. In Philip’s shadow, in Owen’s. Even the shadows are stronger than they are.
Maggie was leaning against the dresser watching her with a smiling glance as she watched the men. “Isn’t that the limit?” she said. “They never get tired talking about boats and how somebody did on the Coombe Spot, and how fast they got away from a breaker when it broke under them.”
“Did you ever hear how long a couple of lobstermen can keep going on different ways to knit a traphead?”
“All I can say is, their wives have to be born to it or else they’d go crazy.” Mag handed a wooden bowl of salad to Diane. “Be careful, sweetie. Here, Tammie, you can carry the fork and spoon. . . . Though I have to say Liza does real well, coming from away and all. And my lands, the people she met when she worked on that magazine! Movie stars and duchesses and everything.” She was incandescent with awe. “And here she is on Bennett’s, just as natural as you please. Gina, now—” She cocked her head at the children, then pursed her lips and chose her words with caution. “Well, it’s hard for her, being so young. Lonesome, you know. City girl. She thinks Willy ought to’ve learned the whole trade in six months so they can go back to the mainland and make a fortune.”
Barry heard that and laughed. “Lordie, he’s not out of the primer class yet.” He pulled Tammie gently to him and onto his knee. Tiger came bristling out from under the stove, and Barry said, “I just want to heft her, boy. I got no little girls of my own and my lap’s being wasted.” The child ducked her chin in her bashful pleasure. Barry reached out and drew Mane to his side. “Now I’ve got two. You going to give ’em to me, Rob?”
“I dunno. I’d have to study on that. Times when I’d part with ’em gladly, but then who’d get my slippers for me and stand my boots beside the stove?”
“Tiger could,” suggested Diane and buried her giggles in Barry’s shoulder.
“He just loves young ones,” Mag murmured to Van. “Well, you do too,” she added with humorous defiance, “and don’t say you don’t, the way you handled these two when Rob hurt his hand.” She sighed, shook her head, and then sang out, “I’m about to take the beans out of the oven!”
It was no effort for Vanessa to be pleasant tonight. She felt so detached and objective these days, as if she floated a little to one side and slightly above the rest. She realized that Rob was bashful about being at the table with her. He wasn’t going to enjoy his food, and his good hand fumbled with the silver as if he’d never held a fork before. It amused her to put herself out to get him over his nervousness.
“When I was a kid this was always my favorite meal of the week,” she said to him. “I’d come up from the shore all smelly with bait where I’d been helping to bag up, and so hungry I could hardly stand to get washed, but I couldn’t come to the table till I’d got the herring out of my ears.”
“You used to bag up?” Rob laughed incredulously.
“I certainly did. Oh, I drowned out the smell of the beans and john-nycake when I came into the kitchen.”
“That’s the truth, Rob,” Barry said proudly. Across the table his eyes brimmed with appreciation of her conduct. “Y gorry, I thought she was coming to our wedding in dungarees and rubber boots, but they hogtied her and sewed her into a dress.”
Rob looked at her, shook his head, and then began to eat with good appetite. I be damned. I thought you’d been a teacher or a nurse, or something like that.”
“He’s making it sound good, Van,” said Mag mischievously. “When he first laid eyes on you, he came home and told me you looked like one of them artists down on Monhegan.”
“You’re making it sound bad, woman,” Rob protested. “Like I thought artists were immoral or something.”
“Well, maybe I am,” said Van. “How do you know?” Everyone laughed.
Before the children went to bed they wanted a song. Maggie was embarrassed, but pleased when they urged her. Diane brought out a guitar and Mag stopped her blushing and grimacing and began to tune it, her face sharp with concentration, her small square hands competent
“Now.” She struck a chord and looked into the girls’ faces. “One tune apiece and that’s all. Folks weren’t invited to a concert, you know. Diane?”
“Bendemeer Stream.” She ran over and climbed into her father’s lap and laid her head against his chest. Maggie’s voice was a surprise, low but unexpectedly strong and true. Van felt a start of genuine pleasure and then exasperation; she was always disturbed by the sentimentality aroused so easily by certain voices singing certain words. She knew Barry would be blinking back tears, and what bothered her was the fact that she too could be moved; it was something absolutely false, it was like taking a lot of drinks and becoming lustful so that any man would do. Maggie was a nice simple young woman who could play the guitar and sing nice simple words, and the fact she happened to have a voice with which to give the words poignance was no more to her credit than the fact that children have silky hair and velvet skins. It was all a matter of glands.
She finished, and in the silence Diane said with infinite longing, “I wish I could hear a nightingale sometime.”
Barry blew his nose and lit a cigarette. Tammie said, “Well, I want ‘Whistle.’”
“I hope that song doesn’t give you any ideas for when you grow up,” her mother told her.
“I like the funny words.”
“My father was Scotch,” Maggie said to Van. “I know a lot of old songs and the kids love the sound of ’em even when they don’t understand.” She began to trot her foot and sing. The pressure was relieved and Van enjoyed the song and Tammie’s delight in it until suddenly the words took on a piercing significance.
There was more, but Van didn’t hear it. She sat looking blindly at her hands in her lap until the last words rang gaily into her head. O whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad.
“And now you two go to bed,” said Maggie. “And dinna ye lallygag . . . or something . . . or I’ll give ye a blink of my bonny mouse-colored e’en, and that won’t be all,” Laughing at her, the little girls took the flashlight she handed them, and went out to the toilet. Tiger went ahead, growling militantly in case.
There was no need for Van to say anything about the singing beyond a conventional remark. Barry could fill in all the gaps, praising and marveling, while Rob was complacent. Mag, getting the children off to bed, apparently was too busy to listen.
“Where’d you ever learn to sing like that?” Barry asked her when she came back to the kitchen.
“I didn’t learn. I could always sing. Father taught me the guitar chords.” She grinned. “Then my aunt had me singing hymns at her seances, but not with Father’s permission. Of course I felt as important as all-out. The medium—she was this fat lady who worked in the fish factory where my aunt did—she said she never could get off into a real good trance without me singing ‘There is a Happy Land’ or ‘Love Lifted Me.’”
“Was she real?” Barry sat forward.
“Of course she was,” said Maggie. “And she had this control named Jenkins. He put her in touch with the folks that had gone to Summer-land.” She smiled at him. “That’s what we call it. Isn’t that nice? There was one man—I can’t tell you his name, my aunt swore me to secrecy and even now I couldn’t break my oath, but he was real important in Limerock—well, he was always coming to Ida to get in touch with his mother. My, it was pathetic, the way he’d be. Like a little boy. He kept saying, ‘Mama? Is that you, Mama?’” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Wasn’t that something now, a grown-up man, president of a bank, and him so lost and helpless?”
“He warn’t all that lost,” said Rob. “If he got to be president of a bank.”
“Well, he never got married,” said Mag.
Mama? Is that you, Mama? Nightmare touched Van lightly again, but she drove it away. Hundreds of thousands had asked that question besides the banker, besides the child waking up in the night probing the dark with eyes and ears because she dreamed someone had spoken to her. I must have been very small, she thought, or else when I dreamed I forgot what I knew in the daytime.
“Ayuh, but what did she say to him?” Barry persisted. “You hear her, with your own ears?”
“Of course I did. She called him ‘Sonny’ and told him not to worry, how beautiful it was there and someday they’d be together . . . And oh yes, sometimes she told him about handling different deals at the bank.”
Rob said solemnly, “I wouldn’t ever keep any money in that bank. Don’t seem hardly reliable. I mean, how did you know if the old lady was a real financial expert?”
“Oh you.” For a moment they were still, gazing into each other’s eyes, then as if a signal were passed between them color flashed into her freckled cheeks and Rob’s amiable witless grin took on a new dimension. It was only for a moment, and then he leaned back and took out his pipe.
Mag hung up her apron. “Anybody feel like a game of Sixty-three?”
“Sure, sure!” cried Barry, snapping his fingers at a prancing Tiger. “I was just saying to Van the other day, ‘We haven’t had a good game of Sixty-three for a hell of a long time.’ Didn’t I, Van?” His eyes beamed loving kindness at her, he was as much carried away by the characters they were playing as she was by The Day.
Later, walking home by Terence Campion’s, she heard peep frogs from the marshy spot on the edge of Long Cove, and she wished she could keep on walking straight by the house, and have the frogs and the May night to herself. But they went inside, and while she was lighting the lamp Barry come up behind her and put his arms around her, gently squeezing her breasts. “You were some handsome tonight. They winked and blinked at sight of you. Never knew what you looked like dressed up.” He nuzzled into her neck. “I’d forgotten too. God, I was hardly able to keep my mind on the cards all evening. Didn’t you see me squirming?”
She wanted to go quietly to bed without hurting or being hurt. She stood still in his embrace. “It was a nice evening, Barry. And now I’m tired.”
“Too tired to talk?” His hands slid and slid.
“Yes. Don’t.” She tried not to snap or sound annoyed.
“But honey, I haven’t had you in a skirt for so damn long.”
“Barry, please.” She went over the rim of patience and put his hands violently away from her. Across the kitchen from him, watching him so he couldn’t surprise her, she said with an effort at calm, “I’m too tired for anything, and that’s final.”
He did not look hurt. He shrugged. “Okay.” He kicked off his moccasins and went upstairs. She took off her blouse and washed her face and brushed her teeth, then read for a while at the kitchen table.
She was brought back by the lamp dimming; the oil in the clear glass base was almost gone. She turned it out and felt her way silently upstairs and undressed in the dark. She looked forward to tomorrow, in which anything could happen, and she put this day efficiently out of mind as if crossing it off a calendar. It was gone, it would never have to be endured again. She slid quietly into her side of the bed, and began to think of a way to get her own room. Barry was willing to put up with almost anything, but the thought of separate rooms or even separate beds could send him into a tantrum. As if she’d disappear if she wasn’t where he could hear her breathing, and then what would he be? Alone, and therefore nothing. . . . Barry was terrified of solitude. It was almost as if he believed he existed only in other people’s eyes. He could sleep soundly beside her, only occasionally furious because she repulsed him, and still draw something even from her indifferent or contemptuous denials.
She stretched and sighed. Instantly Barry said, “Van.”
“Did I wake you up?” She imitated a good yawn. “’Night.”
“I’ve been waiting for you. I thought to God you’d never get through reading.” His voice was quiet but unblurred; he had never sounded more awake. “I thought you were too tired for anything.”
“You know I have to read before I go to sleep. It settles my mind.”
“You mean you wanted me to conk out before you got up here.”
“Have it your own way.” She yawned again and turned over facing the window.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m not going to touch you, goddammit. I just want to talk to you. Now will you do me the favor of listening like I was a human being?”
“I’m listening.” It occurred to her that if they ever could talk reasonably, she might be able to mention a room of her own without his going to pieces. “Go ahead, Barry,” she encouraged him.
“Well, when we came out here I said this was a place where we could put down roots and belong, didn’t I? And I said that we could even start thinking about kids of our own. Well, I’ve been thinking about that right along. And after tonight, seeing those little girls of Rob’s, I made up my mind to—” he was beginning to lose his momentum—“to say something about it.” Belligerence rushed in. “I want a kid of ours more than I want anything else.”
“More than staying here? More than owning your own boat and your own house?”
“That goes along with it. It’s because I’ve got more than a chance being my own man that I’m talking about a kid. And I figger we’d better get started on it right away because sometimes it takes quite a while.”
“Oh, does it?” she murmured. She’d made a mistake by reading so long. He’d been lying up here rehearsing the whole thing over and over.
“You like kids, Van,” he said eagerly. “And you’d be a damn good mother. Any baby of yours would be smarter than all these others put together.”
“Even smarter than Bennett babies?”
He laughed, put at ease by her, and felt for her hand. “You said it. And I don’t care whether we have a boy or a girl. Maybe we could have both. You and I know what it is to be a loner.” He squeezed her hand. “Will you start thinking about it, Van? Right off?”
“I’ve thought about it,” she lied. “Barry, if you wanted babies you should have married somebody else.”
“Jesus, I married you because I thought we were going to have one!”
“And when you found out it wasn’t so, you should have walked out on me and gone back home. You could have four or five of your own by now.”
“I didn’t want to walk out on you! Baby or not, I wanted you!” He was outraged. “Go home and eat crow? You think I’d do that, after the way they treated me? And you?” he added belatedly. “I didn’t want anybody else. I still don’t. Aw, listen, Van, don’t say no right off, promise me you’ll think about it. I know I’ve never made enough to take care of a family but I’m making enough now and I’ll keep making more.”
“That’s not the reason. That was never the reason.” That, at least, was the truth. “Barry, it won’t do any good for me to think about it, because thinking’ll never get me over being scared.” Now she was lying, but with genius, because at once he was anxious and solicitous.
“I sh’d think almost every woman is scared, but they get over it when the time comes, and they forget it. You ever notice that, Van? I guess having the baby is worth everything. And you don’t have to suffer when you have it, Van. They can put you right out.”
“Thank you, dear aunt Barry.” They both laughed. Barry put his arm around her; he had never before been allowed to comfort or encourage her in anything. Well, at least I’m giving him some pleasure now, she thought wryly. “Listen, Barry, there’s something I never told you. The reason I’m scared isn’t the pain. I could stand that. But I could die having a baby. Or the baby could. Or both of us.”
“But that never happens now! How many people did you ever know died that way?”
“My mother did,” she said.
“How do you know? You don’t know anything about your mother!”
“I do now.” She saw the scene rolling out vividly before her, a color movie projected on the ceiling. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to think of it. But one day about two years ago I met Miss Foster in Limerock. It was right in front of the People’s Bank building.”
She was wearing that wine suede jacket Barry’d gone into debt for one Christmas, and black slacks. Miss Foster was wearing that blue suit she always used to wear when she came to Mrs. Bearse’s, with different gloves and blouses. No, don’t be silly, she wouldn’t still be wearing it ten years later, and she’d look older too. And her hair would be gray but still curly. “I never realized Miss Foster was such a pretty woman,” she said aloud. “I don’t suppose I really saw her as a human being at all, back in those days.”
“What did she say about your mother?” Barry persisted. People went back and forth through the bank doors behind them, the doors kept flashing in the sun. Cars streamed by. “She invited me into Scott’s for a cup of coffee,” said Van, shifting the scenes and instantly conceiving a ferocious hunger for a warm honey-dipped yeast doughnut. “I had a raised doughnut,” she told Barry dreamily. “I wish I had a good recipe for them.”
“For God’s sake get on with it!” He threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, scrabbling around for cigarettes.
“I remember the doughnut, because afterward when I felt sick I blamed it on the doughnut, but that wasn’t really it. She told me—she told me—” She faltered as the scene became jerky and out of focus. Would Miss Foster lead up to it or come straight out with the facts?
“She said, ‘You know how you always wanted to know about your mother.’ I didn’t know what was coming. I didn’t know what I wanted to hear. I mean, I knew I wasn’t suddenly going to be presented with a perfect mother. But with what?”
Barry thought the huskiness in her voice was due to emotion. “You want a cigarette?” he offered kindly.
“No, I’ll hurry and get it over with.” She was actually making herself a little sick living the scene; the smell of fresh doughnuts was now nauseating. “I won’t go into all the details. But just by sheer coincidence, a case-worker found out about my mother when she was investigating another case. It’s so crazy I could hardly believe it, but Miss Foster wouldn’t have told me if she wasn’t sure. She said she checked and double-checked.” She cleared her throat. “I—I wasn’t abandoned by my mother, Barry. She died having me. She was too narrow, you see. There wasn’t enough room for the baby, if you can imagine me being a baby—to come down—through —out, whatever the right word is. They started a Caesarian, but she’d been hemorrhaging, and so—” The last word floated. Trapped in her own spell, she saw torrents of blood. “This friend of hers—so-called—took me. They don’t think she made any attempt to get in touch with my father . . .” Her voice sank. “They weren’t married, and he wasn’t a soldier, he was a Coast Guardsman, and he’d been sent somewhere else. But maybe if he’d known he’d have come for me. . . . This woman, she was the one who abandoned me. She left me with someone for a day, she said, and never came back. That’s how the state got me.”
“What a rotten deal,” Barry groaned. “My Jesus, poor little tyke.” He rolled her back into bed and put his arms around her, not offended this time by her stiffness. “Poor baby. What kind of a bitch was she, anyway?”
“She must have had a conscience of a sort,” she said dryly. “That’s how this case-worker found out.” It was a relief to leave the bloody operating room for the slattern slopping tea and pouring out her guilt to the case-worker, one of those fresh-faced young college girls. “She’d gone there to see about the grandchildren,” she said, watching the new scene. “The bitch had a bunch of them, none of them legal, and each of ’em with a different father. She wanted the state to take them over. So she started talking about me, as if she’d planned the whole thing, you know, done the best thing for me. . . . She’d named me after my mother. Anna Howard. So when the girl went back to the office she asked Miss Foster about that name.”
Barry hauled her close to him, all comfort now and no sliding hands. She was surprised to be so cold; the story had been almost too good, her mouth had been trembling there at the end. “Poor little Anna Howard,” he said. “But now you know. . . . I mean, it makes a difference, doesn’t it, knowing your mother didn’t drop you somewhere and skin off and leave you?”
Her trembling increased to a shudder. Mouth locked shut she rolled out of Barry’s arms and out of bed and felt her way downstairs in the dark, hearing him call after her as she concentrated on not vomiting on the stairs. She accomplished it in the wash basin, and was lying over the dresser shivering, waiting for the next spasm, when Barry came down and lit a lamp.
He looked at the basin and whistled. “You almost puked your guts out!” he said in awe. “That did upset you, didn’t it?” He walked around barefooted in his shorts and undershirt, putting the teakettle on the gas stove to heat, shaking his head and making reverent comments that made Van want to shout at him to keep quiet. She thought she had never been so nastily cold in her life, her pajamas glued to her with sweat, her hair damp.
“Will you take that basin out to the toilet and dump it?” she finally asked him, on her dizzy way to the sitting-room couch. He pulled on pants and shoes and went out, and when he came back he asked her if she wanted a cup of tea.
“It might start everything up again,” she said between chattering teeth. She burrowed into the blankets. “I’ll stay here the rest of the night, I guess. I’m scared of what’ll happen if I move.”
He brought her another blanket, and a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. She thanked him, beginning to float now in reaction, the heat from the water bottle spreading deliciously into her stomach. He went out to the kitchen and made a cup of cocoa for himself. She lay there listening to the faint clinkings, and the rattle of a magazine page. He was enjoying his tenderness and concern; he would tell about it tomorrow, though not the reason for the attack, and he would exaggerate her helplessness and dependence on him, adding details that would surely infuriate her if she knew them. Oh well, he has to have something, she thought, and it would be quite a long time before he talked babies again.
She marveled at her own reaction to her lies. It was as if she had lived it through, been both the mother dying of exhaustion and the child fighting to be born; and she had been the winner in the ghastly duel but knew also what it was to the in defeat. It could have been that way, she thought, and maybe I know it in my subconscious, maybe I was living it all again. But if that woman exists, that bitch who never wrote to my father, I should have known it. If I ever passed anywhere near her in Limerock the truth should have clanged and battered in my ears. I want to kill her. She stole my father from me. Why didn’t she throw me into the harbor one night and be done with it? No, she stole. . . . Vanessa fell asleep on the word, crying silently, while Barry was still drinking cocoa and reading out in the kitchen.