The Hearth and Eagle (55 page)

“I wouldn’t care to sell,” she said quietly though she had been conscious of a little spurt of anger. “We need a home. I find I like hearing the sea again. It’s—” She paused, searching for a word to express the sensation of release she had been feeling as she lay listening to the beating rhythm, forever unaffected by puny human struggles. “It’s comforting,” she said at last.

Amos turned his head and stared toward the window. “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.” He drew in his lips with a sharp sound, and reaching behind him found her hand. He held it tight. “Oh, Hessie, you’re a good wife. I haven’t said—I haven’t told you—you saved my stupid life that night.” His voice thickened and he stopped.

Underneath the gratitude, there was the added twist of humiliation. Hessie, whom he had sworn to protect, delicate, bearing his child, finding him trussed like that on the floor, leading him out like a baby—the strong one....

Hesper watched the back of his down-bent head, and felt the quiver of his hand as it held hers. And she understood. She bent over and laid her cheek against his hand.

“I love you—Amos,” she said.

He turned and gathered her into his arms.

They lay quiet together, not speaking, while outside the little window the twilight deepened over the sea and the rising night wind slapped the mounting waves against the shingle.

They were aroused by a vehement wail, and Amos, drowsing in the first surcease he had known since the fire, gave a start, and said, “What’s that!”

“That’s our baby,” said Hesper, laughing. “He’s hungry again. Light the candle, dear—will you?”

Amos pulled himself up from the bed and complied. He held the old pewter candlestick down to the cradle and inspected his son. “He’s got good lungs.” He put the candle on the dresser and picking up the squirming baby handed him to his mother. “What shall we name him, Hessie? You’d like Roger Honeywood, wouldn’t you?”

Yes, she had certainly thought that the baby would be named for her father, and Susan and Mrs. Peach had already assumed so. But then she had not known the situation, nor realized the extent of the mutilation Amos’s pride and self-respect had suffered.

“Hardly,” she said, smiling. “Pa’s name doesn’t fit this young man at all. I can’t picture him writing poetry.”

“Nor I,” said Amos, smiling a little at last. “What then would you like?”

She considered a moment. Henry, of course, had been named for Amos, Amos Henry Porterman. “We’ll name him Walter, for your father. Suit you?”

“Yes,” said Amos.

He stood looking down at them. The bent head, copper-tinted in the candlelight, the tender brooding of her mouth as she watched the baby, the curve of the white blue-veined breast from which his son drew abundance and security.

Amos flushed, and leaning over, kissed the white parting between the waves of hair. “I’ll make money for you, Hessie, again. I’ll get out of here. We’ll start fresh in some other place. Out West maybe. I’ll take care of you better than I ever did. You and Henry and little Walter. You’ll see.”

She raised her eyes from the baby, and the tender indulgence in their shadowed depths did not change as they rested on her husband. “I know you will, darling,” she said, but in her ears as she spoke, stronger than the voice of any human love or yearning, she heard the fateful and omnipotent pounding of the sea.

O
N THE
twentieth of September, 1909, Hesper dispatched the last of her summer boarders, hung a neat black-and-white “Closed for the Season” notice in her parlor window, and went back through the taproom—now the boarders’ dining room—into the old kitchen to wait for Carla. Hesper still called it the kitchen, though of course Eleanor referred to it as the living room, and a new compact kitchen had been built from the old buttery in the rear.

Hesper sat down in her rocker by the crackling fire. It had turned chilly out, and the southeast wind was beginning to blow harder from a tarnished pewter sky. The glass had been falling all day. Maybe the line storm.

She pulled her rocker nearer to the great hearth, watching the flames leap high above the tall black andirons. Walt had laid this fine fire for her, before he went down the path to Little Harbor to look to his lobster pots. She sighed and rocked slowly, feeling the content of fire and rest. Glad to be rid of those boarders, though they were all good people, and mostly regulars from summer to summer. But how delightful to have the house to oneself again. Just Carla, and Walt and me, she thought, savoring it.

To be sure she’d have to put up with Henry and Eleanor too for one night, but not, praise be, that mincing French governess this time. Even Eleanor wouldn’t try that again. Or Henry. Henry, she thought, sobering. Was he happy? And why not?...He had achieved everything he set out to do. “I mean to be rich, Mama—not just rich in Marblehead, rich in the whole world,” and he was; in banking circles his name would be recognized anywhere. He had married great wealth, but he had made it, too. A millionaire.

Strange that
my
two boys should be so different. But they aren’t boys any more, she thought with astonishment. Henry’s forty, and Walt is thirty-three. She stopped rocking and sat up straight, listening to the banjo clock’s tick and staring into the fire.

All those years—where had they slipped to? Looking back she saw her life flowing like a long river through this house, and yet there was a sharp break in the middle when she had left the river and strayed far from it into a different land. The time with Evan in New York, and then the years with Amos on Pleasant Street.

Perhaps the house had known all the time that she’d be back. And without its shelter and the comfort it gradually distilled for her out of its memories, she could not have endured watching Amos’s deepening unhappiness through the years that he tried to fit himself into a life he hated. He had been brave and scrupulously honest throughout the bankruptcy proceedings, and in this town which had always excluded him he awakened some sympathy at last. Some of his Marblehead creditors refused to prosecute, and in the end it developed that though everything else was gone he might keep possession of the little sail loft on the wharf.

Amos had taken it over and doggedly tried to run it, much helped by his old tenant who stayed on for a while out of kindness and taught him the business. The sail loft did begin to make a tiny profit, thanks to the increasing numbers of summer people and their pleasure craft. But the drive had gone out of Amos. He faded before her eyes into a beaten old man, and she, powerless to help him, had watched and grieved.

And then came a day at the end of the summer like today, when Amos came home to supper and told her that Mr. Thompson of Boston, owner of the
Black Hawk,
had given an order for two new suits of sails for his yawl.

“But that’s wonderful!” she had cried. “Aren’t you glad, dear?”

She had never forgotten the tone of his laugh, and the startled way the two boys looked up at their father.

“He called me ‘Cap,’ ” said Amos. “He slapped me on the back and told me to get a move on. He asked me to come over to his house on the Neck sometime when his family wasn’t there. Said I could bring the missis and kiddies along for a treat. It’d be fun for them to see all the elegant decorations and imported furniture.”

She had smiled uncertainly, saying, “But he meant well, Amos, I’m sure, and that’s a big order.”

“It’ll bring in enough to take me to Cincinnati.”

It had been a shock at first, but she had never questioned the rightness of the move for him. He had got wind of a small shoe business there, a young man who might be talked into, taking on an experienced partner. A little hope returned to Amos, and the days before he left they were very close to each other. He was to send for her and the boys as soon as he could. And in a month the summons came, but not from Amos. It came from the Commercial Hospital where he lay dying of a pneumonia he had caught tramping the cold wintry streets in search of an opening that would exactly suit him, for the young man’s shoe business had not.

She had traveled day and night on the train and reached him in time. He had died in her arms, and just before the end he had recognized her, and murmured something about the boys. “Henry.” And she had known he had meant Henry would take care of her.

Hesper sighed, leaning back again in the rocker. Heartbreak. That crazy old Aunt ’Crese on Gingerbread Hill fifty years ago. Had she really seen into the future or had she simply guessed at a pattern for a woman’s life from the wisdom of her own years? “Yo’ll think yore heart’ll never mend, but it will. De heart’s tough, honey.”

Yes, it mends—glued together somehow by hard work, and time and necessity. The cracks are always there, but the organ functions again. And she had had help with the mending—the boys to raise, and the house, and Ma—for five more years.

The Inn had kept them going, though the type of guests changed as the town changed. After the fire of ’77, some of the shoemen built again and tried to carry on the shoe business, but it was a losing battle to Lynn. And after increasingly violent labor troubles and another disastrous fire in ’88, Marblehead ceased to compete. In ’85, when the town went completely dry, the Inn could no longer get a license, and Hesper had started to take boarders. It was the summer people who kept the town going now, much as most Marbleheaders resented their intrusiveness and careless patronage.

So Marblehead after its brief and fruitless compromise with industrialism had reverted to making a living from the sea again. Not the way it used to be, though, not like the fishing fleet, with Marbleheaders working for themselves. This was the sea at one remove, purveying for and tending other people’s pleasure craft. But there was no use resenting it, or despising the yachtsmen who had pulled them out of economic distress, as once she had despised the shoemen who had saved them all from starvation when the fishing declined. “Face up to things” and accept them, as Ma had always said. And the town itself had not changed, not intrinsically. My house hasn’t changed, she thought. Whatdeep comfort that growing realization had given her through the years. There were minor changes, of course, the new kitchen and the two bathrooms upstairs, but its structure and its essence had not changed. And it seemed incredible to her that she had during so much of her youth been deaf to the beauty of its sustaining voice.

The banjo clock coughed and finally struck once. Hesper glanced at it absently. Five-thirty. They’d not be here yet awhile unless Henry had a sight better luck than usual with the automobile. Tires forever popping and the road was muddy out of Swampscott.

She went to the woodbox, picked out a large log, and threw it on the fire. Praise be, I’m near as strong as I ever was. Not run to fat like Ma’s people. When she sat down again she was conscious of the leanness and vitality of her erect body under the black watered silk. Her hair was still abundant and just as hard to manage. It had turned very quickly after Amos’s death to the translucent pearl-white peculiar to auburn hair, but her eyebrows had not turned, and the heavy dark brows gave an impression of youth, which occasionally astonished her when she remembered to look in the mirror.

She had looked this afternoon, coiling her hair into a loose bun against a little jet comb, and putting on a high-boned embroidered net collar that made angry little welts on her throat, because Carla liked to see her dressed in Sunday best. Bless the child, she thought, how I wish Amos could have seen her. Though he’d never said so, she knew how much he too had wanted a daughter. He would have adored this grandchild—if Eleanor would have let him.

She shook her head and smiled. Trust Henry to get himself a wife like that; exactly what he must have had in mind since he was old enough to wear long pants.

Eleanor’s father was Carl Willoughby Norton, Third, and he was one of the first to build himself a summer palace on the Neck. That was in ’81, the year they opened the Eastern Yacht Club, and Mr. Norton was as zealous a sailor as anyone, thanks to a two-hundred-foot steam yacht, an English captain, and a crew of eight. Mr. Norton and his elegant Eleanor never actually did anything on board but sit in wicker chairs on the after deck under a striped awning, and chat with privileged guests.

“Lord, Henry—” Hesper had burst out once while he was courting Eleanor. “How can you stand mudgeting around all day on your backside in that floating teakettle—and you a Marbleheader! Why don’t you take that girl out in an honest sloop or even a dory—give her a real taste of the sea?”

Henry had looked patient. “Eleanor wouldn’t care for it, Mother. Nor do I consider myself a typical Marbleheader. At least I don’t intend to get stuck in this backwater all my life. Look at poor Father.” He hadn’t meant to be unkind; he simply stated facts, and of course he was right. After Amos’s bankruptcy Henry had lived at the Hearth and Eagle, because he’d had to. But he never joined any of the boys’ gangs. She’d never had to wash his mouth out with soap for saying “Whip” and other dirty words as she had Walt’s. He’d never filched cod splits off the flakes, and there still
were
a few flakes when he was little. He’d never played hooky, like Walt. No, he’d forged quietly ahead in his studies, top of his class at the Academy, got himself a scholarship to Harvard and graduated summa cum laude. After that he had had no trouble in finding an excellent financial job in Boston. And then in ’95 he had married Eleanor.

The memory of that wedding tickled Hesper now, though she’d been mad as fire at the time. As you got older it took a mighty bad thing to seem tragic, or even exasperating; more and more you learned you couldn’t run life or even people, just sit back and be amused.

Eleanor had had herself a regular tidderi-i of a wedding. No mother to guide her, but her father had imported some sort of aunt, and anyway Eleanor did all right by herself. “Braeburn,” the thirty-room turreted mansion on the Neck, had been swaddled in flowers sent up from Boston. Even the yacht had had white streamers on her, and Japanese lanterns. She steamed in from Boston the day before stuffed with wedding guests up to her plate glass and engraved brass port holes.