Going Ashore (39 page)

“I’ll be back later,” he promised.

“Now, as for you –” Madeline said to Allie. She took the hairbrush and began brushing Allie’s hair so hard that it hurt.

Allie, accustomed to this daily punishment, said only, “Braid it good and tight, otherwise it comes undone in the water.”

“Since it’s my birthday,” said Madeline, “could you do me a favor and leave me alone all day? Without even speaking to me?”

“No,” Allie said, and added warningly, “Don’t yell at me – Mummy’s coming.”

“Happy birthday!” Mrs. Tracy said as she opened the door. She was wearing blue and looked younger than Madeline. “Allie, let Madeline get dressed. Go on downstairs and put her present in front of her place.” She
moved quietly about the room picking up and straightening Madeline’s belongings. It had been her own room before she married, and it was perfect for a
jeune fille
, but Madeline, she felt, would have been just as happy in a tent on the lawn.

“You’re a very sloppy girl,” she observed, “even for your age. But I daresay it’s a reaction to boarding school. That’s one good thing about this house. People can relax in it and be what they are. I mean I couldn’t survive the winter without a summer here.”

“Couldn’t you?” said Madeline. “I could, with pleasure.”

No one – not even Madeline – was ever rude to Mrs. Tracy, and she stood still, rooted with shock, Madeline’s bathing suit in her hand. Then she saw that Madeline was crying. “Oh!” Mrs. Tracy exclaimed. “Not on your birthday! Allie, honey, will you do what Mummy tells you and go downstairs?”

She sat down on the bed where Allie had been. “I can’t think what can be wrong,” she said. She did not touch Madeline but folded her hands on her lap and looked at them, frowning. “On your birthday,” she repeated wonderingly. “I know it sounds trite, but this is the best time of your life, this and the next four or five years. Why, when I think of your mother at your age! All the gardenias and the orchids! These are the years that should be absolute heaven for you.”

From behind her hands, Madeline said, “I wish you had left me in town. I was perfectly all right.”

“I can’t listen to such nonsense,” Mrs. Tracy said. She stood up, smoothing the covers at Madeline’s feet. “Allie, will you please, for the love of God, do what Mummy tells you for once and go downstairs?”

“I don’t like Mr. Tracy,” Madeline said, “and he doesn’t like me.”

“You’re being dramatic,” Mrs. Tracy said, “but it’s normal at your age.” More gently, she added, “But you mustn’t cry over nothing. In a few years, you can do anything you please, as I do, or your mother does. Now get dressed and come to breakfast, like a good girl. This is a terrible start for a birthday.”

Still hiding her face, Madeline nodded, and Mrs. Tracy fled down the staircase, relieved to be away from so much emotion. Perhaps Madeline had been miserable all summer.

In the kitchen, she found Allie sitting on a high stool, holding a large mixing bowl between her knees. She was scraping the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula and licking off bits of cake batter. Her pale hair, brushed but unbraided, was smeared with batter and stuck to her cheeks.

“Allie! Not before breakfast,” Mrs. Tracy said, from habit. Allie, aware of the absent-minded voice, went on without answering. Mrs. Tracy sat down at the table and leaned her head on her hand. Finally, she said, “When you were upstairs, before I came in, how did Madeline act?”

“Like always.”

“What does that tell me? Put that thing – that bowl – down. What is ‘always’?”

“With Madeline, it means to be rude.”

“Yes. But was she crying? Did she say anything about me?”

“No,” Allie said, embarrassed.

“This is dreadful,” said Mrs. Tracy. “I can’t live for the rest of the summer, even seven days of it, with someone in the house who is thinking only of the train to New York.”

This was beyond Allie. She murmured, “If she is going, will we have a birthday party just the same?”

“There! The party!” Mrs. Tracy cried. “And your father won’t be here. This is his fault. If he had been here, if he had spent more time with us, none of this would have happened.”

“We could call him,” Allie said. “I can get long distance.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like this house, either,” Mrs. Tracy said. “I can’t understand any of this. Everyone I know has always been happy. My summers have always been so perfect, ever since I was a child.” And, bursting into tears, she ran out to the garden, past the astonished postman, who had walked up from the road with a package too large for the mailbox. It contained a present for Madeline, an unsuitable evening dress chosen by her stepmother, whom she had never met.

FROM THE WINDOW
of his room, Paul saw Mrs. Tracy run across the lawn. She stopped and bent down to pull three or four bits of wild grass
from a flower bed. Then she wiped her eyes with her hands and walked calmly back to the house.

He turned to his books and wondered how soon it would be safe to approach Madeline again. A moment later, he heard the postman drive away and knew that he had missed the deadline for his term paper.

Mrs. Tracy put in a call to Mr. Tracy, and Paul began composing a letter to the head of the extension course, asking if he might submit his paper a few days late. He would show the letter to Madeline, he thought.

In the next room, Madeline had stopped crying and fallen asleep. She dreamed that someone had given her a doll house. When a bell rang downstairs, it merged into her dream as something to do with school. Actually, the ringing was caused by the long-distance operator, who had at first reported that the circuits to New York were busy and was now ready to complete the call. Mrs. Tracy entered the house in time to take the receiver from Allie’s hand and assure her husband that nothing was the matter, that she had called only to say good morning.

“It’s a lovely morning here,” she said. “Couldn’t you come up in time for dinner tonight? It’s for Madeline’s sake – you know what a birthday means to a young girl.”

“I don’t know,” Edward said. “I suppose I could.” His office would be unbearably hot, and he was beginning to feel foolish about his quarrel with Madeline. “She’s only a kid,” he said aloud.

“That’s just the point. We mustn’t take her too seriously. And it’s her birthday,” Mrs. Tracy said, as if this fact were a talisman, something that would cause the day to fall into place.

When she had hung up, Allie, who had been listening, looked at her accusingly. “I heard Madeline say she didn’t like him,” she said.

“People often say things,” Mrs. Tracy said. “You must never pay attention to what people say if you know the opposite to be true.”

“Like what?” said Allie.

“Well, for instance,” Mrs. Tracy said seriously, “I could believe I was the only person who had enjoyed being here this summer. But I know it isn’t reasonable.”

She had, in fact, put the idea out of her head while pulling grass from the garden.

“Now,” she said, “will you please, for the last time, call Paul and Madeline, so that we can get breakfast over with and get this day under way?”

ON MY WINDOWSILL
is a pack of cards, a bell, a dog’s brush, a book about a girl named Jewel who is a Christian Scientist and won’t let anyone take her temperature, and a white jug holding field flowers. The water in the jug has evaporated; the sand-and-amber flowers seem made of paper. The weather bulletin for the day can be one of several: No sun. A high arched yellow sky. Or, creamy clouds, stillness. Long motionless grass. The earth soaks up the sun. Or, the sky is higher than it ever will seem again, and the sun far away and small.

From the window, a field full of goldenrod, then woods; to the left as you stand at the front door of the cottage, the mountains of Vermont.

The screen door slams and shakes my bed. That was my cousin. The couch with the India print spread in the next room has been made up for him. He is the only boy cousin I have, and the only American relation my age. We expected him to be homesick for Boston. When he disappeared the first day, we thought we would find him crying with his head in the wild cucumber vine; but all he was doing was making the outhouse tidy, dragging out of it last year’s magazines. He discovers a towel abandoned under his bed by another guest, and shows it to each of us. He has unpacked a trumpet, a hatchet, a pistol, and a water bottle. He is ready for anything except my mother, who scares him to death.

My mother is a vixen. Everyone who sees her that summer will remember, later, the gold of her eyes and the lovely movement of her head. Her hair is true russet. She has the bloom women have sometimes when they are pregnant or when they have fallen in love. She can be wild, bitter, complaining, and ugly as a witch, but that summer is her peak. She has fallen in love.

My father is – I suppose – in Montreal. The guest who seems to have replaced him except in authority over me (he is still careful, still courts my
favor) drives us to a movie. It is a musical full of monstrously large people. My cousin sits intent, bites his nails, chews a slingshot during the love scenes. He suddenly dives down in the dark to look for lost, mysterious objects. He has seen so many movies that this one is nearly over before he can be certain he has seen it before. He always knows what is going to happen and what they are going to say next.

At night we hear the radio – disembodied voices in a competition, identifying tunes. My mother, in the living room, seen from my bed, plays solitaire and says from time to time, “That’s an old song I like,” and “When you play solitaire, do you turn out two cards or three?” My cousin is not asleep either; he stirs on his couch. He shares his room with the guest. Years later we will be astonished to realize how young the guest must have been – twenty-three, perhaps twenty-four. My cousin, in his memories, shared a room with a middle-aged man. My mother and I, for the first and last time, ever, sleep in the same bed. I see her turning out the cards, smoking, drinking cold coffee from a breakfast cup. The single light on the table throws the room against the black window. My cousin and I each have an extra blanket. We forget how the evening sun blinded us at suppertime – how we gasped for breath.

My mother remarks on my hair, my height, my teeth, my French, and what I like to eat, as if she had never seen me before. Together, we wash our hair in the stream. The stones at the bottom are the color of trout. There is a smell of fish and wildness as I kneel on a rock, as she does, and plunge my head in the water. Bubbles of soap dance in place, as if rooted, then the roots stretch and break. In a delirium of happiness I memorize ferns, moss, grass, seedpods. We sunbathe on camp cots dragged out in the long grass. The strands of wet hair on my neck are like melting icicles. Her “Never look straight at the sun” seems extravagantly concerned with my welfare. Through eyelashes I peep at the milky-blue sky. The sounds of this blissful moment are the radio from the house; my cousin opening a ginger-ale bottle; the stream, persistent as machinery. My mother, still taking extraordinary notice of me, says that while the sun bleaches her hair and makes it light and fine, dark hair (mine) turns ugly – “like a rusty old stove lid” – and should be covered up. I dart into the cottage and find a hat: a wide straw hat, belonging to an unknown summer. It is so large I
have to hold it with a hand flat upon the crown. I may look funny with this hat on, but at least I shall never be like a rusty old stove lid. The cots are empty; my mother has gone. By mistake, she is walking away through the goldenrod with the guest, turned up from God knows where. They are walking as if they wish they were invisible, of course, but to me it is only a mistake, and I call and run and push my way between them. He would like to take my hand, or pretends he would like to, but I need my hand for the hat.

My mother is developing one of her favorite themes – her lack of roots. To give the story greater power, or because she really believes what she is saying at that moment, she gets rid of an extra parent: “I never felt I had any stake anywhere until my parents died and I had their graves. The graves were my only property. I felt I belonged somewhere.”

Graves?
What does she mean? My grandmother is still alive.

“That’s so sad,” he says.

“Don’t you ever feel that way?”

He tries to match her tone. “Oh, I wouldn’t care. I think everything was meant to be given away. Even a grave would be a tie. I’d pretend not to know where it was.”

“My father and mother didn’t get along, and that prevented me feeling close to any country,” says my mother. This may be new to him, but, like my cousin at a musical comedy, I know it by heart, or something near it. “I was divorced from the landscape, as they were from each other. I was too taken up wondering what was going to happen next. The first country I loved was somewhere in the north of Germany. I went there with my mother. My father was dead and my mother was less tense and I was free of their troubles. That is the truth,” she says, with some astonishment.

THE SUN DROPS
, the surface of the leaves turns deep blue. My father lets a parcel fall on the kitchen table, for at the end of one of her long, shattering, analytical letters she has put “P.S. Please bring a four-pound roast and some sausages.” Did the guest depart? He must have dissolved; he is no longer visible. To show that she is loyal, has no secrets, she will repeat every word that was said. But my father, now endlessly insomniac and
vigilant, looks as if it were he who had secrets, who is keeping something back.

The children – hostages released – are no longer required. In any case, their beds are needed for Labor Day weekend. I am to spend six days with my cousin in Boston – a stay that will, in fact, be prolonged many months. My mother stands at the door of the cottage in nightgown and sweater, brown-faced, smiling. The tall field grass is grey with cold dew. The windows of the car are frosted with it. My father will put us on a train, in care of a conductor. Both my cousin and I are used to this.

“He and Jane are like sister and brother,” she says – this of my cousin and me, who do not care for each other.