Strange Fits of Passion (7 page)

I circled around the oval common and parked in front of the only house of the four with green shutters. The house was the most prosperous-looking of the group, with a generous wraparound porch at the front. I climbed the steps of the porch, having left Caroline in the car, and knocked at the door. The woman who answered it was already dressed for the cold in her parka, her hat and gloves, and a thick pair of blue corduroy pants stuffed into her boots. She shook my hand and said, "Julia Strout. I saw you in the store yesterday."

I nodded and said my new name; it caught in my throat. I had never said the name aloud before.

"Your car started," she said, locking the door behind her. "You're lucky. They had to call school off today because they couldn't get the buses started. We'll go in your car, if that's all right with you. I haven't taken mine out of the garage yet."

I said yes, that would be fine. She sat across from me in the front seat. She was a large woman, larger even than I had suspected the previous day in the store, and she took up all the space around me in the car. I looked quickly at the woman, but she didn't return my glance, as if she had already seen what there was to see and was too discreet to stare.

"The cottage is just off the coast road, a bit north of town," she said. "Sorry to make you have to double back, but there was no way to direct you to the cottage on your own. The landmark is a pair of pine trees, and I doubt I'd have been able to describe them."

Julia Strout, too, had the Maine accent, but her speech was more refined than that of the grocer or of the man with the handlebar mustache or of the motel owner.

The road was nearly uninhabited and ran close to a serrated shoreline. The view of the water was unimpeded now—a vast, frigid gulf of blue, strewn with islands, stretching out to the Atlantic. There was a wind up; there were whitecaps.

She said, "Here we are. This right."

We turned onto a rocky road, covered by layers of snow and ice and bordered on each side by tall hedges that she said were raspberry bushes in the summer. We slipped and lurched down this narrow lane until we came, unexpectedly, into the open.

A relentless tide licked at a waterline of dark seaweed. We were looking at a spit of land, with a smooth sand beach on one side and a flat mass of pebbles on the other. In between was a rangy swath of dried grasses, thinly covered with snow. A ruined lobster boat, doubtless tossed by a storm onto the grass, lay on its side, its weathered blue-and-white paint almost too picturesque against the desolation of the beach. Farther along the spit was a shingled shack, no bigger than a single room. And beyond the spit itself, four lobster boats—one a forest green and white—were moored in a channel.

"There's three or four men keep their boats here, not in town," she said, "but they won't be bothering you. They'll be hauling their boats in a couple of weeks, except for Jack Strout, my cousin, and he'll haul his mid-January. And when they do go out, they go before daybreak and are out all day." The shack, she explained, calling it a "fish house," was for the lobstermen when they did not go out in their boats; they worked on their gear there during the winter months.

A pine-covered island, barren of dwellings, made a dark backdrop for the boats, and beyond that a broken necklace of similar islands, each receding island a paler green than the one before, stretched out to the horizon.

"The cottage is behind you, to the right," she said.

I made a turn on a patch of wet sand and found better ground on a gravel drive that led to the cottage. It was on a promontory, with views out to sea on three sides, and when I saw it I thought: Yes.

It was a modest house of white clapboards, like a Cape but not as well-defined, with a screened-in porch at the side. It had a second story with a wide dormer, no other ornamentation. The clapboards came all the way to the ground and were not shrouded by bushes or shrubs. Looking at it, one had a sense of neatness. A square lawn, surrounding the house, had been cut from a profligate thicket of wild beach roses, now dormant and broken here and there from the weight of the snow. The house looked naked, sun-soaked, freshly washed.

"The key is in the doorframe," she said, unfolding herself from the seat.

I took the baby from the back of the car and followed Julia Strout up the small hill to the cottage. She struggled with the key in the lock.

There weren't many rooms inside the cottage—a living room, the kitchen, a bedroom downstairs, the larger bedroom upstairs, the porch. It was a simple house, sparsely furnished, and I must have noticed the white gauze curtains at the windows, for that is a detail I would have liked, but my memory of those first few minutes is of a glistening wash of corners, windows, shadows. I followed where Julia Strout led; she spoke plainly, defining objects, spaces.

We returned to the kitchen. The table was made of pine, but it had a worn green-and-white-checked oilcloth cover on it, and around it were four chairs, mismatched, one painted a dark red. Julia was concerned about the heat—the cottage had been frigid when we entered—and was busy for a few minutes turning up the thermostat and descending into the basement to look at the furnace. She showed me where the hot-water heater was and turned it on. We talked about the lane down to the cottage: She said she would have one of the men plow it later in the day.

I wanted to sit down and did. I kept the baby bundled in her snowsuit and her hat. She began to fuss; I opened my coat and nursed her. I sat sideways in a kitchen chair, one arm resting on the table. Through the window in front of me, I could see a gull rise nearly thirty feet straight up in the air with a clam in its mouth, then drop the shell to break it open on the rocks.

Julia tried the plumbing in the bathroom and switched on all the lights to see if they worked. She was examining a light fixture over the stove when I asked if her husband was a fisherman. It was meant to be a pleasantry. I was looking at a gold wedding band on her finger. I looked at the indentation on my finger where my own wedding band should have been.

"He's passed on," she said, turning to me. Unlike most large women, she stood up straight and was graceful.

She explained: "It was a squall, and he caught his foot in a coil of pot warp when he was throwing his pots over, and he went in too. It was Veterans Day. The water was so cold he had a heart attack before he drowned. Usually they go from the cold before they go from drowning," she said plainly.

I said that I was sorry.

"It was years ago," she said with a movement of her hand. She paused.

I thought that she would go on, but she moved toward the counter and looked for a light bulb in a drawer instead.

I turned back to my view. The gulls, several of them now, swooped high into the air with their booty, like feathers in an updraft. In the silence of the kitchen I could hear what I'd been too detracted to hear earlier—the business of the day outside the cottage: the gulls cawing and calling; the swell of the waves over the pebbles, the settling of these stones in the ebb; the drone of a motor on the water; the rattling of a windowpane from a gust. The cadence in those natural sounds brought on a sudden sleepiness.

Julia Strout finished her inspection of the cottage and came over to the table where I was sitting. She had her hands in the pockets of her parka.

I was still wearing my scarf and sunglasses. By tacit agreement, I had not removed them, nor had she referred to them. But the scarf and glasses were cumbersome, unnecessary now. With my free hand, I unwound the scarf, removed the glasses.

"I was in a car accident," I said.

"I can see that," she said. "It must have been a bad one."

"It was."

"Shouldn't that lip be bandaged? Or have stitches?"

"No," I said. "The doctor says it will be fine." The lie came easily, but I found I could not look at her when I said it.

She sat in the chair opposite. She seemed to be studying me, making, I thought, a judgment of some kind.

"Where are you from?" she asked.

"Syracuse," I said.

"I used to be at school with a girl from Syracuse," she said slowly. "I don't suppose you would know the family."

"Probably not," I said, avoiding her glance.

"You've come a long distance."

"Yes. It feels like it."

"There's a clinic in Machias—" she said.

I looked up sharply at her.

"For the baby," she added quickly. "And of course yourself, if you should need it. It's a good idea to know where to go in case of emergency."

"Thank you," I said. I reached for my pocketbook on the table. "I'd like to pay you now. What is the rent?"

She hesitated, as if thinking to herself, then said, "Seventy-five dollars a month."

I thought: Even in St. Hilaire in the winter, she could get twice that. I had three hundred dollars in cash in my wallet. I calculated that if I was very careful I might be able to last at least two months before I had to find a job or figure out how to get into my bank account without anyone discovering where I was.

Julia accepted the money, folded it into the pocket of her parka. "You don't have a phone here," she said. "I don't like to think of you here alone with the baby without a telephone. You have a problem, you'd better go up to the LeBlanc place—that's the blue Cape just before we turned in. I'm pretty sure they're on the phone. For other calls, you can come use my phone, but I'm afraid we don't have a public phone in St. Hilaire. You have to go to the A&P in Machias. There's one inside the door."

She shifted her body in the chair and looked at Caro line. "I think you'll find St. Hilaire a very quiet place," she said.

I nodded.

"You'll need a crib," she said.

"I have the basket."

She studied the baby again. She was thinking. "I'll get you a crib," she said.

I noticed that her glance tended to slide off my face and rest on my baby's instead.

She stood up. "I'll be on my way, then," she said. "That is, if you don't mind running me back to town."

"No, that's fine," I said, gathering up the baby and my keys.

"It feels warmer in here, don't you think?"

I did think it was warmer and said so.

Julia moved toward the door. She looked out at the ocean. I was behind her with the baby.

A sharp gust rapped at the glass. I glanced beyond Julia to the seascape outside. I saw the snow-covered grass, the gray-black rocks, the deep navy of the frigid gulf. The sun glinted painfully off the water now. I thought the view was brilliant in its way, but inhospitable.

I had the impression that she was thinking about the ocean or the view, perhaps thinking of her husband, who had been lost in the gulf, for she stood at the door longer than was natural.

I was about to speak, to ask her if she had forgotten something, when the tall woman turned, looked down at my face, then at the baby.

"This may be none of my business," she said, and I felt my heart begin to lurch. "But whoever did this to you, I hope he's in jail."

***

I am tired. It is late, but you would never know. The lights are on in the corridors, and it is noisy here, very noisy.

I will write tomorrow and the next day, and then I will send this off to you. You will be surprised.

I have traveled so far—farther than you will ever know. Sometimes I remember my life as it was just a year ago, and I think to myself: That can't have been me.

We drove to town in silence, the droning of the motor or the vibrations of the car causing Caroline to drift off to sleep just seconds after we had emerged from the lane onto the coast road. When we reached the village of St. Hilaire, Julia told me to park in front of the store. She would watch the baby in the car, she said, so that I would not have to wake Caroline in order to buy supplies. It was a sensible solution to a logistical dilemma, and I accepted it as that. I put the car in neutral, left the motor running and the heater on.

I shopped quickly, perfunctorily, trying to think of staples, composing lists in my mind as I wheeled the small shopping cart up and down the aisles. The grocer was there behind the counter, making notations in a ledger. He nodded, squinted at me with his good eye, asked if I had liked the Gateway. I told him it had been fine, that Julia Strout was renting me a cottage.

"The cottage," he said. "The one over to Flat Point Bar?"

"I think so," I said. "It's north of town on a small peninsula."

"Yup," he said, satisfied. "That's the one. Tight little place. You'll be all right there. Well, well. Good for Julia."

The groceries cost me twenty dollars. I felt my own motor revving with the car and wanted to leave the store. But the grocer seemed reluctant to let me go, as if he had questions he wanted to ask, but had to make small talk before he could reasonably get to them. I didn't want him to get to the questions, and was impatient as he slowly put the groceries into the paper bags. I suspected that he functioned as a central source of information, and that he would be expected to report on the new woman who had come to town, the new woman who wore large dark glasses at night and covered her face with her scarf. Or possibly he already knew some of the answers to the questions. Would Muriel have called Julia, and Julia, in turn, have called Everett Shedd? I thought not. I didn't know why, but I trusted Julia Strout, could not imagine her as a gossip or as a woman who would give away much of anything very easily.

The grocer appeared not to like the arrangement of the groceries in the bags; he began to take some of the items out and then to replace them. I inhaled two long breaths to keep myself from sighing out loud. He counted my change with elaborate care. I thought of Julia with Caroline in the car. I did not want to be indebted to anyone. Before the grocer had finished with his repacking job, I whisked one of the bags off the counter and said quickly, "I'll start taking these out to the car."

I put the groceries into the trunk, drove around to the other side of the common, and let Julia off in front of her house. There were people about now—a group of school-age children throwing snowballs near a war memorial, us ing the large stone monument as a fort; an elderly woman shoveling snow in the driveway of the house next to Julia's. The old woman, lost amid the woolen layers of her clothing, was bent nearly double over the shovel, her progress snail-like across her driveway. Down by the co-op on the wharf, there were capped pickup trucks in soiled rusty colors.