Off Season (10 page)

“Jon is the second-ranked New York State amateur player in his age group,” his father said. “He has what it takes to play professional tennis, if he wants to. He gets special lessons at Eaglebrook, and has a great coach in Albany. I practice with him too. We usually play every day. I want him to let up a little, try some sailing and all, but we’re going to have to play a couple of hours most days. I hear there’s a court in the colony.”

“Yes, and it’s a disaster,” my mother said. “Nobody who hasn’t been coming here a thousand years can get near it. Tell you what, though—the twins’ family has a good clay court, and I’m sure they’d be more than happy to let you play in the afternoons. I never see anybody on it. I’ll ask for you.”

“Thank you,” Arthur Lowell said.

“I’m taking lessons,” Peaches said. “I’ll come play with you, Jon.”

“Well, young lady, I’m afraid it has to be just Jon and me,” Jon’s father said. “I drill him pretty hard. He doesn’t need distractions. But maybe one weekend we can all play.”

Far, far back in Peaches’ luminous eyes I saw a storm begin.

“Well, Jon,” my father said. “You want to get an early start in the morning on that sailing?”

“Oh, yeah!” Jon looked at his parents.

“Of course,” his father said. “It’s very generous of you. He needs to be home by lunchtime, though. I like him to rest an hour or two after lunch, before we start practice.”

Jon said nothing, looked at no one.

“I want to learn,” Peaches said loudly. “I want to learn to sail!”

“No sailing this year, darling,” her grandmother said with the first note of firmness I had ever heard in her voice.

“Nine o’clock?” my father said.

“Yes sir,” Jon said.

The storm grew nearer.

“Well, on that note we should get home,” Claire Lowell said. “We need to check on the dogs and get to bed early. It’s been a long day.”

“You all must be tired,” Mrs. Davenport said, “but perhaps Jon would like to stop in for a bite of supper with us? We’re having a crab casserole that Peaches likes.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Davenport,” Jon said, smiling at her, “but I promised I’d bring Wilma back after dinner.”

The canon bent a stern eye on Jon.

“You’re not going to let that animal out, are you?”

“I had a real trauma with a big dog,” Peaches announced importantly, looking up under her eyelashes at Jon.

“Did it bite you?”

“No. But it came up real close to me . . .”

Jon stared.

“Don’t worry about Wilma, Canon,” my father said with just a bit of an edge in his voice. “We’ll see to it that the dog situation works out well for everybody.”

“Except the dog,” I said under my voice.

“Right. Except for the dog,” my father said in his normal voice, and everyone smiled, thinking he had made a joke. Everybody, I thought, but Jon.

Everyone left shortly after that. It was not quite full dark, but it soon would be. The nights were longer now than they would be again until this time next year, and the mornings were born at four-thirty, when the gulls woke the crows and the crows woke everyone else.

Jon hesitated. “You coming sailing with us tomorrow?” he asked.

“I might,” I said, looking only into the red teeth of the fading fire.

“Well, you can’t,” Peaches snapped. “Your daddy said it was just one person at a time.”

“I know.” I smiled at her. “I just thought I might take out the big boat and follow along, see how things were going.”

“Can you sail the big one?” Jon asked. There was awe in his voice.

“Oh, sure,” I said, not daring to look at my father. As a matter of fact, I could sail the Friendship, but I had never been allowed to take her out alone.

My father was silent.

“Boy, I’d sure like to learn to sail that one,” Jon said reverently. “I think it’s the prettiest boat I ever saw.”

“Later, maybe.” My father smiled. “
Much
later. She’s one of the sweetest of the old boats to handle, but the bay can get tricky very quickly. We’ll see. And by the way, a lot of people have called the Friendships the most beautiful boats under sail, even now. You have a good eye.”

Jon’s white, chipped grin lit the dusk, and then they were all gone.

I heard Peaches’ voice reach storm pitch. I knew it was not going to be a particularly peaceful meal in the Davenports’ house.

“See you after supper, with Wilma,” Jon called back.

“Okay.”

At dinner that night, at the old scarred round pine table that had fed generations of Constables, my mother served thick, buttery clam chowder from the general store, and she and my father had white wine. Jeebs had left to spend the weekend with a St. Albans friend whose family summered on Little Cranberry Island. Mother lit candles and the fire snored in its dying. It was our customary first-night dinner, and I would have missed it if we had not had it. But I could hardly eat a bite; there was a little prickling dam in my midsection that would not let the food pass. My face burned, too, from the sun and wind and whatever else lights young faces when their attention turns away from themselves and fastens on another person for the first time.

“Are you sick?” my mother wondered, reaching over to feel my face.

“No,” I said. “We ate the sandwiches pretty late.”

“I liked the Lowells a lot, didn’t you?” my father said. “They’d make a good addition to Carter’s Cove. I hope they stay.”

My mother looked down at her plate.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” she said. “That old pile they’re in would cost a fortune to renovate.”

“Well, from what the canon tells me, that’s not a problem,” my father said. “I gather the quarries make a small fortune. I mean, Eaglebrook, and Yale, and that station wagon . . .”

“That station wagon is a bit much, I think,” my mother said. “I mean, a sky-blue Lincoln up here in this mud pit?”

“What about you, Lillybelle,” my father taunted, using my old childhood nickname. I hated it.

“I really like them,” I said neutrally. “Especially Mrs. Lowell. She’s funny.”

“Ah,” my father said. “And what about Jon? I can’t imagine you dressing up like that for a bunch of grown-ups.”

“I didn’t want that Peaches to think I always looked like a doofus,” I said.

“Point taken,” my father said. “It’s going to be a long summer with Peaches, I fear. But anyway, you surely looked pretty.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled. My hands were beginning to shake. I clenched them in my lap.

“I think he is a very nice boy,” my mother said. “Polite, natural, certainly not silly like most kids his age. If he grows up to look like his father, he’ll be something.”

I lifted my eyes and stared at her. Grows up to look like his father? Couldn’t she see what Jon looked like now? How could she miss that rangy golden beauty, that perfect Michelangelo face, saved only by the chipped tooth from the inanity of perfection? “I like the way he looks,” I said.

“Well, of course,” Mother said. “When he grows into his ears and nose and hands and feet, he’ll be a handsome young man. We’d better keep him away from all those colony mamas up here without their husbands.”

“I like the way his mother looks better,” I said.

“Actually, I do, too,” my father said. “Herr Lowell is just a bit too Light Brigade for me.”

“I’m going outside and wait for Wilma,” I said.

“Take your sweater,” my mother called after me.

I went out and sat down on the edge of the porch and looked out over the reach, toward Deer Isle and Great Spruce Head, beyond it. There was no moon yet tonight, and I could barely make out the shape of Little Deer Isle. I could see the lights of the colony there, though, and, far out on the reach, the riding lights of two or three boats already anchored there.

The stars were out, though. They almost always shocked me when I saw them for the first time at Edgewater every year. Huge, burning silver chrysanthemums hanging so close you could almost touch them; the silver peppering of smaller stars, the diamond-dusted arc of the Milky Way. The constellations were as clear as if someone had drawn them in silver chalk. I saw the Big and Little Dippers, the Belt of Orion, and Deneb, Altair, and Vega, the stars by which seamen and airmen navigated for centuries. My father had tried, without success, to teach me celestial navigation. Now, I thought, I’d like to learn. Jon would like it, too. Low on the horizon Venus burned like a torch. I leaned against the porch railing and waited.

I heard the jingle of Wilma’s chain, and then the frenzied scudding of his big feet on the gravel drive, and then he was up the steps and pawing and licking and snuffling me all over, ecstatic. Jon trotted behind him.

“I thought I was going to have to ride him over here,” he said, gasping for breath. “He had a great time with us, but when we started home he went berserk.”

Over his blue shirt he had put on the same old sweater he had worn all day, and I wanted to lean over and bury my face in wet wool and smoke and salt.

“Is he going to be a problem this summer?” I asked.

“Not at our house. The Berneses love him, and so does my mother. He had a nap on the sofa with his head in her lap before we came.”

“I hope your father will like him.”

“Oh, he does. He just doesn’t show his feelings very much.”

We sat silent for a small space of time, looking at the star-pricked bay. Phosphorescence danced on the frills of its little waves. You hardly ever saw it except on the moonless nights. The reach was larky tonight, almost playful. It seemed to be laughing softly.

My skin prickled, and I felt as if the hairs on my arms were reaching out toward Jon.

“Well, I better take Wilma on in before he starts barking and the canon comes down with a gun,” I said.

“Or holy water,” Jon said. “I’d like to take all three of them down under Peaches’ window and let them bark,” he said. “Or read her
The Hound of the Baskervilles
out loud. In a dark room.”

I burst out laughing, charmed once more with his quick, quirky humor.

Finally he got to his feet and said, “I need to get back,” and turned to go. I sat still, hugging Wilma. Then he turned back, fishing in his pocket.

“Brought you a present,” he said, taking my hand and putting something in it and closing my fingers over it. I opened them. It was a feather, a small, silvery white breast feather of an osprey.

“Thanks,” I said over the hammering of my heart. “I’ll keep it always.”

“I can always get you another one,” he said.

“No, I want this one.”

He faded away into the dark, around the side of the house. I sat staring at the place he had been. It seemed to me that he left a hole in the skin of the world.

I went in and loosed the maddened Wilma into the living room, where my parents were sitting with coffee before the frail fire. I heard him scrabbling and whimpering with joy, and heard them talking to him, and turned and went upstairs to my bedroom. I was suddenly so tired I could hardly slip out of the linen slacks and the sweater, and left them in a pile on the floor beside my bed and dived deep under the down quilts.

But I did not sleep. I lay on my back staring at the dark ceiling. I don’t remember thinking anything at all.

At some point later Wilma came thumping into my room and scrabbled into bed with me and curled himself up against my ribs and under my chin. There was a lot of Wilma. I could feel the warmth of him against my entire left side.

I turned over and took him into my arms and held him against me, and felt him shudder and groan with luxurious pleasure.

I started to cry, fat, warm, silent tears.

“I love you, dog,” I whispered. And then, “I love him.”

This was simply too much to get my mind around, and so I stopped crying and let sleep come with the smell of wet dog in my nostrils and, down farther, perhaps in my heart, the smell of smoky wool and the dry scent of the osprey feather still clasped in my hand.

CHAPTER 4

W
hen I came downstairs the next morning, it was still and quiet and dim. I had slept hard and long and did not know what time it was. Last night’s blaze of stars had given way this morning to lowering gray clouds and airlessness. Later in the summer such a day would produce stunning heat, but now it was only heavy and thick. It sat on your skin like soap scum. I knew it wouldn’t last, though; by tomorrow one of early June’s great thunderstorms would boom through like an infantry barrage and everything would be blue and nearly transparent again. Whoever had said “If you don’t like the weather in Maine, wait a few minutes” was right. It was one reason we came so early and stayed until Labor Day. Back in Washington, when the great, sullen heat set in, it would not break until almost October.

I could hear no sounds of human habitation, and I felt groggy and disoriented. I don’t think I had been alone at Edgewater much until now, and the feeling was fairly ominous, as though it were a different house, much older and larger, and I a different person. Down deep, uneasiness stirred. It was more than the quiet and the aloneness, I knew, but for a moment I could not think what it was. Then I did. I remembered the whole of the day before and Jon and the osprey feather, and that I had fallen asleep thinking
I love him.

The uneasiness spiked up into near panic. Kids didn’t love other kids, not the way I meant. That came, I presumed, much later. Kids simply did not love kids. Kids love their parents in the offhand way they always had, or their dogs, or their best friend, or geometry. That love had nothing at all to do with what I had felt in the darkness last night. The enormity of it frightened me profoundly. It was too big a leap; it asked too much; it implied an inevitability I knew nothing about. Feeling like a child in a kindergarten play, I called out into the echoing silence: “Anybody here?”

“In the kitchen,” Cecie’s voice replied. There was an edge of annoyance in it. I went shambling into the kitchen in my old madras shorts and a GW sweatshirt of my father’s. Cecie sat at the scarred kitchen table dragging cold butter across cold toast. Always, on the second morning of our summers in Carter’s Cove, and on many other mornings, she and I had early breakfast together at my house, planning the day while the other cove kids drifted into the house and my mother whisked in and out, asking about everybody’s winter and settling down to do her morning telephoning, and Clara bustled about coaxing fresh toast out of the rusting old toaster and smacking her own homemade blueberry jam down into the middle of the table. This morning rang with difference.