The End of the Point (17 page)

Aug. 20. The fuzzy pale pink steeplebush is just beginning to open on the path from the Stricklands’ to Teal Rock. Will identified sea lavender in Grandmother P.’s book. It said it grew near marshes, so we hurried to the creek and found a cluster just coming into bloom. André has been here for nearly two weeks and leaves tomorrow. He is bored, though he will not say so, and he is pleasant enough to everyone but keeps his distance, even from me, so that it feels lonelier to have him here than not. I grow impatient with his perpetual outsider status and envy Jane for having married Paul, though at the time it seemed a safe and even tedious choice. We grew up not
knowing
how to be bored here. We are trying (my idea) to speak more French with the children, which makes me remember Lausanne and how free I felt there, and how romantic it was to be wooed in French. One day I realized I could live in Europe forever and survive. That was when I told André that we had to move back if we were to marry; the realization was just too frightening to me.

You might lead 1,000 different lives for a time, and then it comes down to one. Nature flings herself about, though, profligate. We walked at the end of the Point where the army roads have nearly disappeared. Caroline stepped in a thicket of poison ivy. Belle took her home and washed her right away, but she is already getting a rash and is panicked about it, so prone to overreacting. The boys found sticks and an old empty rifle shell and played on the gun emplacements, singing “Beer Beer for Battery B” with all their might. With their scabby knees and puffed-out little chests, they made cunning soldiers. I played the enemy and died several times over, which of course they loved. They have no idea what war really means, and I pray they never learn.

August 29. Over a hundred morning glories in the garden. Charlie counted 92 yesterday and 116 today. Mummy, Caroline and I went to the Packet and Mummy bought us mother/daughter dresses on sale, fussing about choices for much too long. Tonight I let Caroline sleep in her dress. This afternoon we sat on the dock and looked at a fishing boat drifting back and forth through the fog and tried to remember it for the winter. Charlie said he was afraid he would not be able to remember it, as it would be such a long time till next summer. Jane said take a picture in your mind, so all the children did, pretending to click. I told them they could draw it or write it down when they got home. Of course, I am the only one who did. People are so inherently lazy, or is it that the memory is better left alone? The Big House is packed with houseguests. Gaga and Grampa have a hotel, Will said. Dossy left yesterday after having barely just returned, and took Holly and Phil away with her. At least she came for a few days. We did our gardens together, rotating days, and swam. The ocean is so warm, it feels heated in spots. I swim and swim.

Sept. 2. I’m reading a fascinating book about King Philip’s War, which literally happened right here, an extraordinary thought, the Wampanoag burning Padanaram! If only I could go back in time. As it is, I intend to do a serious search for relics and enlist the boys. I got a book from the library about how to cordon off an area and do a little dig. Charlie found two flat, pointed stones he is convinced are arrowheads. I offered to take them to an archaeologist at Columbia, and he nearly bit my head off. Either he doesn’t want to let his treasures out of his sight, or he’s afraid of finding out the truth. I hope for the former but suspect the latter. I looked up “Ashaunt” in a booklet of Indian terms in the Historical Society and discovered it means “lobster crawling backward” in Wampanoag. No one here appears to have investigated this before, but Daddy was quite interested, and we looked at other words too. I remember a friend of Mummy’s—a houseguest here, no less—saying she thought Ashaunt allowed one to retreat from the real world in dangerous ways. At the time, I was so indignant I began to argue with her, but she would not budge, and finally Mummy had to intervene. Only now, watching the children turn savage and dreamy in a particular, back-turning way, do I understand what she meant. Shouldn’t a boy
want
to know if his arrowhead is real?

Sept. 3. All the guests at the Big House finally left, and Mummy asked me for a walk. She told me she is concerned I’ll be overtaxed this fall between my studies and the children (and she doesn’t even know about my analysis!). I assured her that I’d be fine and told her that going back to school means the world to me, even if to her it might seem like a strange and unnecessary thing to do. Then she confided in me that when Daddy first got sick, she’d been making plans to go to college. I asked why she couldn’t have gone anyway, with Stewart, etc. to help out, and she said it just felt wrong to expand her world as Daddy’s grew smaller—and also he simply needed her more. I said, Well, you could go to college now, he’d be all for it, and she laughed and said that my going for my master’s is good enough for her. Then she gave me a little silk bookmark for luck. I don’t remember her ever having confided in me this way before.

Sept. 6. Today a few glorious clumps of wild sunflowers on the road to Barney’s Joy. They have a spicy marigold kind of fragrance. The clematis smelling like orange blossom covers the stone at the Big House and the walls around Jane and Paul’s. Today felt like the end of summer and the first day of autumn. I went swimming with André, Will and Charlie this morning, and Daddy came down with Stewart to watch—quite a coterie of men! Along the road, even the latest summer flowers are wilting. Later, we took out the Beetle Cat, and I wished I could store the day’s golden light. The children are horribly moody, not wanting to leave, especially Charlie, who says his saddest times on Ashaunt are equal to his happiest times in Bernardsville and that he hates school (which is not true). Caroline has gathered half the beach. Labor Day has always brought me an almost physical pain, a little death, but this year, unlike any other in my memory, I am ready to leave, so excited by what awaits me.

Sept. 12. This morning, Hurricane Donna raged through New Jersey, taking down our dear enormous willow tree, and now it has hit Ashaunt! I talked to Mummy, who said the docks were all right—they took the swimming dock out ahead of time and the boat dock was holding on—but now the phones are down and I hate not being able to call. Paul drove there yesterday to help get the boats out and is still there. Jane is frantic that he’ll get swept away or crushed by a tree and has called me five or six times, so I finally told her to just come over with the children and spend the night, and they’re on their way. On Block Island, there are wind gusts of 130 mph, according to the TV news. Here, it is just raining now, and we did not lose power. I should be glad we are not on Ashaunt, but I hate to miss a hurricane, to feel its power and walk out to the end where the wind might flatten you and the gray waves crest high, then curl and teeter and finally fall. There is almost nothing so beautiful and, at the same time, so frightening, as that curved lip. If the storm is anything like the one in ’38, it could do terrible damage, but it does not seem to be that bad.

Sept. 14: The children’s first day of school was today, delayed a day because of Donna. Tomorrow I take the train to New York for my first class and start analysis again. Perhaps the hurricane is an omen (but of what?). When I left Caroline at kindergarten, she looked so stiff and pale, but I told her we were both starting new schools and must be brave, and I’ve hidden a trinket in her lunch. In the car, the boys discussed shoes as if they were torture devices and refused to put them on until the last second, when they limped dramatically into school. They are disconsolate about missing the hurricane on Ashaunt, and generally full of complaints. Thank goodness I have a driver lined up to take them to school after this.

I had a dream last night of buying school supplies for myself and finding that instead I had a sack of sawdust and ashes with a hole in it, everything leaking out. If dreams are always screens for something else, my screen is awfully thin! I will have one course on early American history, another on primary sources, a third I’m not sure of yet and an adviser who won a Pulitzer Prize.

Sept. 15. An exhilarating day of classes! On Tuesday I was too afraid to speak, dizzy with nerves, but I practiced with Charlie at home, which made him feel important, and today I simply forced myself to raise my hand. The professor seemed to think my comment reasonable, and after that I was off and running. At thirty-four I am one of the oldest students and one of only a handful of women in the department’s master’s program. Every small thing—getting a sandwich from the machine outside the bookstore, hearing people debate ideas in the halls—is thrilling to me. I was exhausted by the time I got to analysis. Dr. H. said I could just drift and nap if I wanted, but I told him I’ve never slept in public in my life and would not, anyway, waste the money. “Public,” he repeated (I could have predicted it), and I said I was aware that he thought it was a mistake for me to take off the whole summer and had a need to make me feel like I’d lost ground. “
Ground
?” I said then before he could, and I played me and him for a good five minutes, back and forth, and even got his New York Jewish accent (I think he is Jewish, though he won’t say). He didn’t laugh. I got the sense that I’ve grown tiresome to him in my absence. I arrived home at seven to find the children fine and glad to see me. Hurricane Donna has killed hundreds of people, according to the newspaper, but no one in Massachusetts.

Sept. 20. An A on my first assignment! It was only an annotated bibliography and account of research methods, but I’m still pleased. I just hope I can keep it up. Belle told me she wants three weeks off in December to go to Haiti. My courses don’t end until just before Christmas, but her mother is sick, so what can I say? I will have to find someone to substitute. Meanwhile Dos is back at Four Winds. We’ve told the children she has hepatitis. The doctors say she has an agitated depression, and they have her all doped up on drugs (after saying that drugs were part of the problem . . . ). I have a great deal of reading to do tonight but can’t seem to concentrate. I cut back to three times a week for analysis and feel unsteady now, though that might have nothing to do with it. I do hate it when Dos is at Four Winds. There is a woman professor at Columbia who came to speak to our seminar, quite mannish and knowledgeable and an expert on captivity narratives. The professors all seem tremendously busy, even harried, which I don’t quite understand, as I’d thought the academic schedule was constructed for the life of the mind. I am starting to be able to tell which students are full of hot air and which have real ideas. There are an equal number of both, along with a terribly shy and agitated girl who reminds me of Caroline. I offered her a mint, but she wouldn’t take it. She does not speak, which makes her seem mysterious and brilliant (I should try it).

Sept. 25. I’m in the middle of reading
Of Plimouth Plantation
—and to think that we’re direct descendants of Governor William Bradford! Charlie was interested, so I told him about some of it, and he asked question after question—about the Indians, private property, religion, governance. He has such a first-rate intelligence, coupled with such natural curiosity, and he is already the best little companion at age 9. I commented on how hard it must have been for the English colonists to arrive in the middle of winter to a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Charlie said, “But Mummy, to the wild beasts and men,
we
must have looked wild,” which is of course true and shows a highly developed capacity for empathy. And then to make a life from nothing and built on such faith. I’d have found it terribly exciting if I didn’t perish along the way.

Oct. 7. Back for the weekend. We arrived at eleven yesterday evening and carried the children to their beds. The house was all put away, sheets over the sofas, screens off the doors, shades pulled. Some porch furniture got blown off and ruined and some trees got uprooted and boats damaged (not our Beetle Cat, which was out of the water), but it could have been much worse. Last night I wished we had not come, for it was too bleak, but the morning changed everything. Such a wind, and such clearness and colors, I have never seen before, everything scrubbed clean. The yellow and red chrysanthemums are in full bloom now, and the dahlias. The roses have turned to red berries and the huckleberry bushes and bay bushes to purple russet. Though the sun shone brilliantly and the sky was cloudless, the land and sea seemed in the middle of some polar night where the sun has neither risen nor set. The rocks were dark and jagged, the sea black and blue, the land all shades of blue and red.

Now the boys are off wandering, set free, and Caroline is chattering and hopping about like—my nickname for her—a Carolina wren, happier than she has been in weeks. As we came back from a walk, tiny birds with brown wings and white breasts flushed from the ground, but we could not see them well enough to identify them in
Peterson’s
. In the afternoon Jane and Paul took the children to play with Ellie, leaving André and me alone in the house for a time, which turned into a romantic interlude. He took me by surprise today, covering my eyes with his hands while I was reading. Afterward I wept, though I cannot say why.

Being here, I find myself more than ever two people instead of one. One longs to live day by day, for sparking driftwood fires, and closed doors, the wildness of my fall garden, harvesting vegetables to boil on the stove. The children. To keep them young. To keep them from the world and all its pain and disharmony. When I am in that state, I can imagine abandoning all ambition and just living inside all this beauty.

And yet it is never enough, for I also long to study, to create something lasting in words, to achieve things that the world will recognize as unusual and distinguished and escape in complete absorption into something outside myself. To talk with others about things that matter and go for Truth.