WHILE SHE WAS in Maine, Maude admitted what she had been afraid to hope and therefore to say: that the calls were from Seth.
“You think your mother is, like, seeing him secretly?”
They were hunched on the frayed oriental rug in front of the fire, which they had been feeding with pine cones for the crackle and burst of flame. Mary Jane and all the others in a shifting cast of guests had gone to bed. Maude wore a cashmere sweater left behind by some male visitor which, with her knees against her chest, she could pull down to the tops of her sneakers.
“Why would he call her and not you guys? And why wouldn’t she tell you?”
“Not if he doesn’t want her to. He would never call my father, never. And, I don’t know. He hates me.”
“Maude.”
“No, he really does. It’s weird. He was nice to me when I was little, and I used to try to stop Milton from, you know—doing mean things to him—”
“Milton mean?”
“Oh—he probably doesn’t mean to be. He just doesn’t notice anything for incredibly long times and then, whomp, you get in his way and he’s ready to, like, kill.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I guess he seems like someone who would never get angry. He seems so floating above it all. But he has this—you can’t believe his temper. I mean, short fuse does not describe it. He even killed my cat.”
“He killed your cat?”
“It was an accident. It was me he was angry at.”
“What was he angry at you for?”
“He was pounding Seth, and I called him a bastard. Milt, that is.”
“And he killed the cat?”
“He was chasing me, and the cat was like sitting there, and he kicked her. She hit the brick wall, you know, the chimney. It was really awful. She just lay there with her eyes open and blood coming out her mouth.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“He said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ like really disgusted, and left us to clean it up. Seth helped me bury her anyway. Oh, poor Ghostly. That was her name. She was white.”
A log, burnt through, shifted with a spray of sparks and settled once again to a steady crackling.
“I can’t believe I’m telling you. I never talk about this stuff.”
“It’s pretty, I don’t know, incredible. Your parents always seem really sweet with you.”
“Well, it’s not as if I’m making this up. Why do you think Seth left?”
“So, what did you mean he hates you?”
“Oh, it’s just—like when I used to come home from school, I’d try to get into my room without him seeing me. Not that he wouldn’t come into my room. I used to beg my parents to let me have a lock on my door, beg them.”
“What’d he do?”
“He just really, really hurt me. Like he’d grab me and twist my arms so that—I can’t describe it, I guess. I always thought something was about to break. I even heard cracks; I’m not kidding. Sometimes I blacked out. That scared him. Once, he got my head between the wall and my dresser and pressed, and I guess I stopped breathing or something. I really thought that was it. And it was so weird: one minute he’s trying to kill me and the next, we’re sitting there; I’m holding my throat—it’s so awful when you just can’t get air. He said I was blue. He’s like staring at me. And that’s the thing: it felt as if we were in this conspiracy together. He’s trying to kill me, but in this weird way, I’m still on his side. I can’t explain it. I don’t think I even told my parents. Not that it would have made any difference.”
“I wish I could meet him.”
This made perfect sense to Maude. Weesie had seen the impressive tape collection and heard of Seth’s participation in Freedom Summer, his summer jobs as a migrant worker picking cherries, then peaches, and working his way north to apples just before he had to go back to school. It was easy to imagine him in some gorgeous wreck of an apartment in a broken-down neigh-borhood in Brooklyn or Hoboken, or in some tough waterfront hotel maybe, letting his mother know that he was still alive, was all right, but swearing her to secrecy or she would never hear from him again. Apprenticing himself to a bookbinder or working on the docks or something.
Maude was only away a few weeks, and nothing in Milt’s letters hinted at anything amiss. It was always Milt who had written the rare times she had been away. The one summer she was at camp, when she was so young she couldn’t read, he had sent letters that were mostly pictures—him climbing up a ladder with a nestling he’d found in the grass; the nest with the other baby birds, beaks gaping; a toad with which he’d been rewarded for making one of his coerced attempts on the lawn; a picture of his brother, Maude’s uncle, who had come by with his loud wife, Marjory; a picture of Maude’s teddy bear, Rusty, who missed her, he said, so much that the thread holding his chest together was coming undone.
His two letters to Maine were more grown-up but showed a similar consideration for her concerns, something that didn’t happen when she was around. He told her they finally had tomatoes from the garden and that if, when she got back, she wanted to paint her room, he’d pay for the paint. It was Milt the good father who wrote, as if letters made love safer.
He’d always offered this kind of care to Seth. Seth’s interests had prestige. Milt built them up, if anything. Then he hated Seth for losing interest and disappointing him.
Standing in the comfortably blowsy old-fashioned Maine kitchen that looked out at an overturned boat being repaired, Maude was so moved that her guard fell and she forgot to worry. It was like being cradled in comfort. This momentary lack of vigilance so frightened her by what might have happened—she was like a nervous passenger who believes that she must pay attention every second to keep the plane in the air—that her anxiety surged back with full force. She could feel the sensation—like squirrels chasing each other through her chest—of her heart missing beats, and the fear inflating her belly.
Yet she swam in the freezing water; took sweaty, apparently pointless hikes; fell in love with meadows of wildflowers; was baffled at why waiting for clams to roast on a damp chilly beach with sand getting into your shorts was supposed to be fun, and was equally baffled at why, afterward, it seemed to have been fun; could at no time be coaxed into a sailboat; and loved lying in the dark in the spool bed, in a room that smelled of old wood, talking to Weesie in the four-poster.
No one wore perky matching outfits except the tourists they saw when they went into town. Maude’s instinct for what was acceptable had not been far off—a preference for the worn and the casual prevailed, as at Bay Farm—but she was not practically equipped: her cheap acrylic sweater was as useless for keeping warm as it was nasty to touch; her grayed, delightfully hole-ridden sneakers wobbled and slid on steep trails; and her paint-stained sweatshirt was a bit much, looking either grubby or ostentatiously arty. Everyone had suede hiking boots that laced over hooks and peculiar shoes whose lower halves were ribbed rubber—so ugly that Maude felt, when she saw them, they surely couldn’t mean it. Then she wanted a pair. In one of her tiny sundresses, with the rebozo she had saved to buy in Greenwich Village, she had looked, at an outdoor chamber music concert, unself-consciously to the manor born.
Then she came back to the manor she was born to.
As she was dropped off, the usual children were drooling and pummeling each other in the crabgrassless lawns of the houses all around, while teenage girls on towels glazed like rotisserie meats basted with Coppertone. At the verge of their own dandelion-studded lawn, only her father’s van rested like an obedient elephant by the curb in front of the pricker bush and green-apple-filled tree.
A class was letting out as she walked in. Departing housewives turned their teased heads to look back at the master counseling a woman who was explaining that she just couldn’t make charcoal work: “It doesn’t do anything fa me.” She had the kind of New York accent that was starting to be called a g’Island accent, after people who glued together the g and I of Long Island, Long- gylind. Matching the bright shirt she wore was a perky hemmed triangle of cotton, tied over her ears at the back of her neck.
As soon as he got the last of them out and closed the pink front door, Milt’s face, affable and wise, crumpled. It was like the stock shot of demolition where an apartment building folds in upon itself and silently bursts into clouds of dust. He fell on Maude’s shoulders, gasping and weeping.
“Daddy?”
She didn’t have to be told. She knew what she’d really known for weeks, and somehow he hadn’t—that Nina was leaving them, slipping away. It wasn’t Seth coming back; it was Nina leaving. Bearing the unbearable weight of her father, her shoulder wet, Maude could see the vegetable plot, which once again looked like an extention of the uncut field beyond. He hadn’t weeded the garden. She’d said to keep it weeded. Her hands rested uneasily on his thin, shaking back. His bottomless need for sympathy and reassurance and his equally bottomless contempt would, now, fall all on her.