Off Season (13 page)

We went down to Naskeag Point, where, I told Jon, rumor had it that there were, in the rocks fringing the shore, the petrified tracks of one of the Viking longboats that were said to have discovered this beautiful point centuries before. I had never seen them, and the Mainers I knew usually just shrugged and said, “Makes a good tale, doesn’t it?”

But I knew in my soul that the tracks were there, and I never ceased looking for them.

We went halfway to Blue Hill and back, singing as our wheels burred sweetly on the long hills down. We went down to Sedgwick and bought ice-cream bars and sharp cheddar cheese said to be the best in Maine at the teeming little general store there. When I learned later that the cheese came from Vermont, I simply chose to disbelieve it.

This day I had been saving for last, for this first Friday of our liberation. This Friday we came up to Caterpillar Hill.

Never think that the very young cannot love. Never think that. They love with a fierce, direct love. This first love is one-celled and consuming, the lovers unable yet either to fear for or save themselves, untrammeled yet by experience, unleavened with wiles and prudence. I simply loved Jon Lowell with all my heart and soul, and it never occurred to me that he might not love me. I think that on that day we were both still easy with it. What came after hung blooming in the air far ahead of us, but we did not yet need to touch it. It would ripen; it would last. It was, then, simply enough to be together, to talk endlessly, to laugh at everything and nothing, to drown with pure joy in our alikeness. I read no more Frazer. Jon played no more tennis. So far, no one seemed to mind. We did not touch.

Now we lay side by side in the springy blueberry barrens of Caterpillar Hill, full of lunch and drowsiness and as near-perfect contentment as I could ever remember. My mother’s solstice party loomed, exotic and gleaming, ahead of us. The molten golden week lay behind. It was a moment out of time, the kind you remember when you are very old, though I did not know that then.

“It feels like when we get up we’ll leave outlines of ourselves, like an X-ray, or a photograph the sun took,” I said drowsily.

“Yeah,” Jon said, just as drowsily. “We can come back in fifty years and here we’ll still be.”

Happiness such as I had never known flooded me. “We can come back in fifty years . . .” After a few minutes I asked, “Do you like tennis?”

“No,” he answered. “Why did you ask me that?”

I did not know. The words were simply out of my mouth before I thought about them.

“I guess because you never talk about it,” I said finally. “And it doesn’t sound like much fun if you have to do all that stuff your father makes you do just to play it. I mean, do you really want to be a tennis professional when you”—I almost said “grow up,” but stopped. I often forgot he was not grown up.

“No. I want to be an archaeologist, I think. I loved studying it at school. We saw a lot of artifacts in museums around Boston, and we went on one or two little digs. I found a piece of blue-and-white pottery that my teacher said was probably from the earliest Colonial period in Massachusetts. He thinks it was a piece of a teapot. I remember that it felt so funny in my hands when he said that that I almost dropped it. Hot and quivery, almost alive. I could almost see the woman who made the tea in it. It was . . . a great feeling. I knew then that was what I wanted to do. I was supposed to go on a real dig this summer with this guy from Harvard who sometimes takes a prep-school student with him. The dig was in Peru, around where the last Incas were supposed to have lived.”

He did not continue, so I said, “But your father wouldn’t let you.”

“No.”

“Couldn’t your mother have helped you persuade him? I mean, I know she’s on your side.”

“I never told her I wanted to go.”

I lay silently in the sun, trying to get inside his mind. Then I said, “My father says I can do anything I want to. He says nobody ought to put a kid’s mind in a cage.”

“So what do you want to do, then?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling foolish. “There’s lots that would be fun, I think. A writer, maybe. Or something with animals, or the moon and stars, or . . . oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just run away and join the circus.”

He laughed, behind the screen of his own upraised arms. “I bet you could, if you wanted to. You aren’t afraid of much, are you, Lilly?”

“Well . . . not yet. There’s probably a lot of stuff I will be afraid of later, but it hasn’t happened yet.” And then I thought,
But it has. Love has happened to me. And I don’t know what to do with it.

“Are you afraid of your father?” I asked. It never struck me then that the question might be impertinent, too personal. This was Jon. I wanted to know this.

“I guess I am,” he said slowly, still not looking at me. “I don’t mean that he’ll do something to hurt me. I’m afraid of hurting him. I think about that all the time.”

“How on earth could you hurt your father?” I asked in astonishment, sitting up to look down at him.

He did not answer. He rolled over so that his face rested on his crossed arms in the blueberry brush, so that the sun hammered his back. Then he said, “I had a brother, Lilly. A big brother, almost ten years older than me. My dad says I was a surprise, but my mother says she’d been planning for me for a long time. It doesn’t matter. Sib was . . . everything. Almost from the minute he was born, he was everything. He was so good-looking by the time he was ten or twelve that he was almost—unbelievable. I don’t think he even noticed, although he couldn’t beat girls off him. His grades were fantastic. He was a born musician. He won every essay contest he entered. He was president of everything they had at Deerfield. And there wasn’t a sport he couldn’t do, if he wanted to. He was phenomenal at tennis, so good that Deerfield gave him a full four-year tennis scholarship, which they almost never do, and he’d already been accepted at Yale by his junior year at Deerfield. There were scholarships waiting for him there, too, and my dad said that some of his old fraternity brothers told him in confidence that Sib could probably have his choice of fraternities, probably even Skull and Bones. My dad almost flipped over that. He didn’t make it.”

“What on earth is Skull and Bones?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of secret club a few guys get to join.”

“Will you be in it?”

“If Dad has his way I will. I hope I am. Then everything will be all right.”

“Why isn’t it all right now?” I wanted to know. “If he wants you to be the best tennis player in the world, you probably could be. What else does he want you to be? King?”

“No,” Jon said into his arms. “Sib.”

I could think of nothing else to say, but felt the darkness coiled deep in this conversation.

He rolled over onto his back and looked at me. The dying sun turned his eyebrows pure gold and poured over the strong, straight features. I noticed for the first time that there was a tiny round scar, an indentation like a period, at the corner of his mouth. In the sun his skin was poreless, a golden hide. My heart twisted with love for him.

“Arthur Sibley Lowell,” he said and grinned slightly. The grin was crooked. “I idolized him. I followed him every step he took. I must have driven him nuts, but he never tried to get rid of me. He always made time for me. It was my dad who shooed me away so Sib could practice, or whatever.”

Something inside me began to chill, slowly, as if cold water crept up my limbs toward my heart.

“You said . . . you said you
had
a brother.”

“Sib died when he was seventeen and I was seven. It was an accident. I thought my father would probably go crazy from it. He went down to the quarry office and didn’t come home until real late every night. I almost never saw him. My mother was torn to pieces too, of course, but she would hold me for hours or sing me to sleep, and she never, ever stopped saying that it wasn’t anybody’s fault, and that my father would realize that in time.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If it was an accident—”

“I caused it, Lilly,” he said. His voice was guttural and his face twisted briefly and then relaxed into passivity.

“He’d just graduated from Deerfield, and his graduation present was one of the first Corvettes. It was bright red, a great car. He tinkered with it constantly when he wasn’t driving it. I was crazy about that car. I was forbidden to ride in it yet, but he was going to take me for a ride right before he went away to Yale. Dad told me never to touch it, not even to get near it. I remember once thinking,
If Sib died, I bet I’d get that car
. . .”

I reached over and put my hand over his. It was warm and smooth, with hard little sailing calluses in the palm and older tennis ones along the outside of it. He did not move it for a moment, and then he curled his fingers around mine and squeezed them so hard I almost felt the bones crack. But I said nothing, only squeezed back.

“I’ve wished Jeebs would kick off a million times,” I said. “I’ve even told him I wished he would. Everybody does that, Jon.”

“I know. I even knew it then. It still hurts, though. It really hurts.”

He looked at me. “I’ve never told anybody about it.

“So anyway, one day in the summer just before he was going to Yale—I remember that because his trunks were all over everywhere and Mom was filling them up with new underwear and sheets and stuff, and he was laughing at her. He was out at the driveway where it runs into the street, waiting for some friend of his to come pick him up. They had dates that night. It’s a long, steep driveway and it curves right at the end. He was lying down at the bottom of it. He used to do that when somebody who was coming to get him was really late, make believe he’d waited so long he’d gone to sleep. There wasn’t anybody around, so I crawled into the front seat of the Corvette and fiddled around with the dashboard, and somehow I let off the brakes. I . . . couldn’t . . . I couldn’t figure out how to put them on again. I remember that I was scared to death nothing would stop me until I hit the street, and I’d be killed, and nobody would care because they’d told me not to play in the car in the first place. It seemed like a long time, and the car went faster and faster, and I started to yell, and then—”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t.” I began to cry silently. I did not think I could bear that terrible old pain for him.

“I don’t remember a lot about the year after that,” he said. “I know my mother was almost always with me. I know I started at Eaglebrook, and I know the tennis lessons started, but I don’t really remember them. Just what people told me.”

“And so he started right in making you . . .”

“Into Sib. Yeah. I doubt if he even realized it. Mother does, but she doesn’t know I hate the tennis and all the rest of it. If she did I think she’d come right down on him. But nobody’s wanted to hurt him any more after . . . that. It doesn’t hurt me to play tennis right now, I don’t guess. I can always change things when I get to Yale. Maybe I won’t even go to Yale. Maybe I’ll go to—Ole Miss or somewhere. I’ll be eighteen then. I can pick my own classes and maybe even what I want to do. I don’t have to go on to law school and come home and run the business. I know that here.” He touched his forehead. “I just don’t know it . . . here.” He touched the Lacoste shirt over his heart. “In here, I still feel like I have to give him back Sib, or at least try. I know nobody could do that, not really, but I just know that I have to try.”

I did not say any more. My tears dried themselves on my face, in the little evening wind that sprang up with the turn of the tide. The air was cooling slightly. It was time to go.

We got up and packed our picnic things and pushed the bicycles onto the main road. I looked back to where we had been lying. I truly thought for a second that I could see the outline of our bodies there, in the blueberry bushes.

We were swooping side by side down the crest of Caterpillar Hill when I said, “Boy, I guess it’s a good thing your dad isn’t going to be here for the famous solstice party. He’d probably call the sheriff on all of us.”

Jon did not look at me.

“He’s coming home this afternoon,” he said. “He called early this morning. Some piece of equipment or other didn’t come in and he’s coming back for a week or two till it does. Mom’s gone over to get him at Bangor. They may be back by now.”

I said nothing. We rode steadily until we reached the cutoff onto Reach Road and home. By then the sky was turning lavender and the Strawberry Moon was swelling yellow, and I knew that if I went back to look, there would be no X-rays of Jon and me in the blueberry barrens of Caterpillar Hill.

CHAPTER 6

F
rom the top of the back roof overhang, it was possible to see and hear everything that went on on the lawn, the veranda, the driveway, and a stretch of the lane that connected the cottages. At six o’clock that evening I went into my parents’ room and climbed out their window to the roof and sat there with my arms wrapped around my drawn-up knees. My mother’s solstice party was not due to start for another half hour, but I knew that she and my father and Clara and her daughter and granddaughter, who were known to be good with parties, would be either in the kitchen or out on the green lawn by the seawall, preparing to honor the gods older by far than ours.

From my perch I could see my father stringing Japanese lanterns from the great pines and firs surrounding the little glade by the seawall, and my mother setting candles on the small round tables she used for outdoor parties. These were covered not with their customary color-splashed cloths but with some sort of white, drifting stuff that I suspected was the old organdy curtains that had once hung in the guest bedroom. The tables were garlanded in greenery, and there was a small bouquet of what looked to be ferns, ivy and balsam sprigs, silvery woods moss, and the last of the wild pink and purple lupines. The effect was surprisingly pretty, I thought. Only the colors of the sea and sky and the woods, all lit by tiny flickering flames and the wash of vermillion from the sunset far to the west, and the rising radiance of the voluptuous Strawberry Moon. Even the green darkness of the deep woods around us would be moon soaked tonight. Shadows would be sharp and ink black. I remembered my earlier fancy that all the small wild things danced on our lawn in the light of such a moon. It did not seem foolish now. Just as my mother had said it would, magic was waking in the woods, and it would soon walk with us on the lawn.