The End of the Point (11 page)

“And would you mind getting some lemonade?” asked Mrs. P. “I have no idea where Annie is.” She made her voice bright and pitched it forward. “Hello, Fanny!”

Bea went inside, poured three glasses of lemonade and took them out, then went back in to pour two more glasses, one for Janie, one for herself, though the drink was on the sour side and watery, both sugar and lemons being scarce. If anyone had asked why she carried the two drinks upstairs, sat on the window seat in Janie’s room and sipped while the child read and gulped and read, she’d have said she had forgotten about Mrs. P.’s request to bring Janie down. Pushed further, she might have answered that she missed Janie, their quiet time together, and that downstairs Janie was likely to be overlooked, misunderstood or judged. No one came up to look for Janie. No one even called. The family forgot things; one moment broke over and erased another. If it suited you, you could just sit back and wait. Forget.

But were you angry? the questioner might have asked (except no one ever would).

Angry, no—why?

About your shellflowers, or Teal Rock, or not knowing what Grandmother Porter said to Mrs. Porter about you. Or about being left out or ordered round.

I wasn’t ordered. I was asked.

You were asked to bring Janie down. Did you forget?

I brought her lemonade.

Because you were angry?

The child was thirsty.

How did you know?

I knew.

XIII

T
HERE ARE MOMENTS
in every life when something terrible happens to someone you love in a place where you are not, and you don’t know what has happened until afterward, and if you had known, you’d have altered the course of things by placing yourself here, not there, a restraining wall, a force of nature:
Stop
. At the time, though, the peacefulness that follows you about is plump and full and generous, as if the day itself were tricking you:
Come, my pretty, look away!

The Sunday morning that Bea left the house to go for a walk with Smitty, Mr. P. was sitting on the porch with an old college friend—relaxed and talkative, a martini on the table by his side. Janie was off playing, for they had, that weekend, right after Grandmother Porter left, a set of houseguests, the college friend, Mr. Lyall, plus his wife and their children—a girl a few years older than Janie and a boy her age. With her mother-in-law gone and friends visiting, Mrs. P. was gayer than Janie had seen her in months. The day before, she had even forgotten until evening to check the mail. Stewart had pulled out more porch furniture, set up the croquet set. It felt almost like before the war.

“Happy walking,” Mr. P. called after her and Smitty, and then, to Mr. Lyall but knowing they could hear, he began to sing: “
A fine romance, with no kisses, a fine romance, my friend, this is . . .”

Bea walked faster. Why must he always tease her? He had the velvety, rich voice of a vigorous man, and sometimes his eyes rested on her in a solemn, appreciative way that made her freeze for a moment before she moved away. It being Sunday, the workers on the base had stopped construction, and Mr. P’s singing followed Bea and Smitty down the road—“
We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes
”—and Smitty took it up from there—“
but you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes!
” They were around the bend by then. Bea stopped. She stood very still, a soldier at attention. She wiggled her ears. It never failed to make him laugh.

“Does the boss know you can do that?” he asked.

For an odd moment, she thought he meant the corporal. “Who?”

“Mr. P. They should pay you extra for it.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know,” she said, although he did. In fact, in the days when Mr. Porter’s muscles still obeyed his brain, he’d been able to do it himself. The children had tried but never found the proper muscle, and other than saying that it required a certain amount of concentration, it was not a thing Bea could explain. “I don’t do it for everyone,” Bea said. (Was she learning, at her late age, coyness? Was she learning, taught by her charges, how to flirt?) “It has to be the right time.”

“I’m honored.” Smitty touched her earlobe, stroking it between his thumb and index finger, and the sensation was like nothing she’d ever felt before, radiating up her scalp to the roots of her hair, and down her neck and into—somehow—the very soles of her feet.

Then he kissed her, tongue thrusting at her lips.

She turned her face away. “Not here.”

She’d have liked him to keep on with the earlobe bit, do it for longer. When she was ready, she could touch his earlobe too, return the touch. Like snails, they would proceed, or perhaps not even proceed, just stay right there, taking endless pleasure in this small but exquisite part of each other.

“Where, then, sweetheart?” His hands were at her waist, squeezing a bit too hard.

She straightened up. “I—well, we could . . . we could sit at the dock and talk.”

“I might be all talked out. Guess I went on for a while, huh? You must be sick and tired of my voice.”

“No. Anyway, we can sit.”

They turned and made their way down the steep path to the boat dock, then reached the bottom of the hill and walked out the dock to the wooden floats, where they sat on an overturned dinghy (first he dried it with his sleeve), their knees lightly touching.

The day before, he had, without her asking, told her that he’d been engaged to be married, but his fiancée had died suddenly (Bea had pictured something violent—a house fire, or a milk truck slamming in), that he lived next door to his mother above their hardware store and was a part owner in the shop, which turned a nice profit and had expanded a few years ago to include small kitchen items, steady sellers with the ladies. The speech had felt rehearsed. He’d seemed nervous, which made her nervous too. It’s a shotgun apartment, he’d said and then explained that it was one room and another and a third, you could shoot a gun straight through, though of course they never did, and she’d remembered the coldwater tenement where she’d held her first job in America, working for a Jewish family with one small boy and the mother on bed rest, expecting a second child. They had drunk black coffee in that family; they would not mix milk and meat; they had not liked it that she’d throw out tea leaves to make a fresh brew when there was still tea in the pot. The family had been thin and dark, full of strange customs and cheap (as she’d been told, growing up, that Jews were), and she’d thought, So this is it, this is America, and then (lucky for her, for she’d grown attached to Samuel, the little boy, and might not have left him on her own), the new baby was born and the mother climbed out of bed and they did not need her anymore. At the agency, she had requested a house outside the city, one with other Scots help if possible, and she’d landed at the Porters’ tall front door.

Smitty had gotten some of this out of her. He liked to ask her questions, bit by bit, here and there, and had a way of making her say more than she meant to. Later she’d forget she’d told him something until he brought it up—“like those Jews you lived with,” or “What do you reckon your mother would’ve thought of me?” or “We could use your ironing on the base.”

“I hope I didn’t make you worry,” he said suddenly, “telling you about Greta.”

At the time, she had felt surprise and pity but not worry, exactly, but now, hearing the name again, she had a sharp sense of what might have been: he’d been engaged to a woman named Greta but Greta was dead, as her own mother was dead, and if either woman had lived, she and Smitty would not be sitting here today. As a family man, he might well have been exempted from the war, and if he’d ended up on the Point, he’d be writing home to his wife each day; he wouldn’t have stopped to meet her on the road. With her mother alive, Bea would be—where? Why, with her mother, of course. Home in Scotland with her mother. She had, then, a sudden, chill presentiment: Smitty would die in this war. He’d be shipped off (they all would, eventually, as other, greener men came in to take their place), and he would die.

“It’s just—” Smitty stood up and turned away so that she had to strain to hear his words. “I thought you’d want to know, and it’s not like it matters—I mean, it
did
matter a lot, of course, but I’m a new man now, I don’t want you to think—”

“It didn’t make me worry.”

People did not take her into their confidence often, not even Janie or Agnes, nor she they. She did not court confessions. Everybody had a past, and everybody’s past had its share of grief and trouble, some more than others. Friendship helped. Routine. Staying busy. Moving on. Singing. Prayer. Greta, like Gretel in the fairy tale. Was Greta German? Big-boned, like Bea, she must have been. Or thin and blond and American, fast on her feet, brainy and sassy (she pictured Helen), or dreamy and poetic (she pictured Dossy). Greta. It was not the name of anyone she knew. Smitty was too close to the edge of the dock, rocking back and forth, his feet half over the edge of the wooden planks, and without thinking she stood, grabbed his arm and yanked him back.

“Be careful,” she said, “or you’ll fall in.”

He laughed and stepped away, and then, before she could register what he was doing, he’d stripped off his shirt, trousers, shoes, and vaulted from the dock in his skivvies and done a heavy cannonball into the water. The splash was tremendous. When he surfaced, his face was upturned, streaming. “It’s like bathwater! Come in!”

“Me? I can’t!”

The splash had splattered her dress, wet her face. She tasted salt. If there was one thing she loved, it was water; still, she could not possibly join Smitty, who was—for this, she was grateful—entirely submerged, except for his head, which, soaked, looked smaller now, sweeter, and at the same time, unfamiliar in a way that took her aback.

“Why?” he called up.

“I haven’t got my bathing costume.”

“Go in your . . . whatchacallit, slip. I won’t look. I’ll swim to that thing—”

He pointed to the Red Nun buoy, bobbing in the distance, one of the army’s efforts to keep civilian boats inside a circle that Helen complained was the size of a bathtub, though to Bea it looked vast. Before she could answer, Smitty was off, doing the crawl, his stroke confident for a man from the middle of the country. When he reached the only moored Beetle Cat, he stopped and wrapped his arms around its hull. Don’t climb in, Bea thought (the boat,
Little Brown Jug
, was Charlie’s). Then he was off again.

On the dock, she knelt down and struggled to unzip her dress, then took off her dress and sandshoes. She moved calmly but quickly, trying to outdistance both potential onlookers and her own second thoughts. Was she? Would she? Could she? She tucked the dress under an oar. In the ocean, Smitty had reached the Red Nun and was treading water, facing out to sea. There were no real steps at the boat dock, just a vertical wooden ladder slick with algae. In her full slip, Bea descended carefully into the water, feeling the fabric balloon around her legs before it plastered itself, a second skin, along her thighs. What was she doing? What was she thinking? And if someone came by? Good Lord.

But the water was fine. And it was her day off. The Porters often swam in the nude, all of them, from grandparents to children, though whenever Bea took Janie, she made the child wear a suit, and she put on her own in private (once, when Janie was three or four, Bea had caught her peeking in, wanting a look). The water at the dock was unusually cold; she might have been in Arbroath swimming with her cousins as a girl. Smitty had turned now, heading back. She swam toward him, her slip making it awkward at first, then not. When they reached each other, he hovered next to her.

“I didn’t think you’d come in!” he said happily. “You’re a good swimmer. A regular little duck.”

“Quack quack,” said Bea.

He dove under, disappearing and coming up on the other side of her, so that she laughed and turned around. She swam too, trying, each time she lifted an arm, to keep the rest of her underwater. The sea was green and murky, and unless you looked hard, you could not see much, though once she saw the white flash of his army-issue skivvies, and once, as he came up near her, he must have seen her own self underwater—cycling legs, cotton-plastered middle, her belly bigger than she’d like it, pale hands cutting through.

He did not touch her during their swim, not once, and they barely spoke, Smitty first at her side, then swimming away, diving under, gone. Bea going under too, though not too deep, quietly aware of how at home she felt in body, sea, with him. When she surfaced, he was several yards away, sun gleaming on his head. She gave a little wave. For a time, they swam parallel, she in breast stroke, he in slow crawl. When she said she was ready to get out, he swam discreetly to the buoy. On the dock, her slip was dripping buckets, but she wrung the hem out and forced her dress on over it, then turned to face the land while he swam in, got out, got dressed.

“Nothing like a swim,” he said.

And then he did something that astonished her, coming from a man, coming toward herself. He laid a hand low on her stomach, flat over the front of her wet dress, so lightly that she could barely feel his touch.

“I’d like to have a baby in here someday,” he said.

It was noon by then, or a little after, the tide coming in. The few boats in the water clanked against their moorings. The ocean slapped against the dock.

“Me too,” said Bea. She had long ago given up the idea of having her own child—not given up, even, just never let the desire quite take shape, until in its shapelessness, it evaporated, slipped away. Now, fresh from the water, met by his words, she felt as if anything could happen: inside, out.

Later he would repeat it to her, stubborn as a child, belligerent, all gentleness bled out of him:
You said me too you said me too you said me too.

Now he kissed her brow. “Well, then.”

She laughed. “Well.”

In the distance, she saw a figure coming down the path, onto the dock, and knew from the stride that it was Stewart, in his black trousers and white shirt.