The Dawning of the Day (26 page)

He smiled at Philippa as if Vinnie were an endearing child they could both enjoy. “She sounds like a darling,” Philippa said. “Your month must have been a very happy one.”

“Well, it was. And it lasted as long as the letters kept coming, and afterward, when I thought they were piling up somewhere and I'd get them all at once. . . . Funny, I was out there two years, and I never doubted once that she was still there.”

Philippa braced herself figuratively and literally. She put her elbows on the desk, her chin in her hands. “But she wasn't.”

“She'd been gone so long,” he said ironically, “that nobody else in the house remembered her. They were all new, even the superintendent. I remember standing in that hall with them all looking at me as if I had battle fatigue and they should call the shore patrol. ‘Sure you got the right house, Bub? Try next door, huh, son?' Trying to ease me out. I kept telling them I was right, I kept hoping someone would remember. Then the man who had the flat now, a thin little weasel with yellow teeth, said, ‘She's probably collected ten guys' allotments and now she's living in style in LA.'”

“Did you—hit him?” asked Philippa.

He shook his head. “He was a little fellow, wore glasses. Besides, what he said didn't mean anything to me. Less than a gull hollering over a rotten fish head.”

He came back and sat on the desk again. “I've never told this to anyone. They think I've lived like a monk, I guess. But you have to know. It's like what you said about being married to Justin. Someone else has had a hand in making you what you are, and so in a way I can't explain—I haven't the words—he's a part of you and I have to take you both. It's the same with Vinnie.”

“Yes,” said Philippa.

“I didn't know where she'd worked, so there was no one to ask. It was the strangest feeling, worse than being lost in the bay in a fog. I was surrounded by people, but there wasn't one who knew her. She was gone. I had a crazy idea there might be a gravestone somewhere with her name on it, but I never found it. For a long time I had dreams about it, not just when I was asleep. After I came home, I'd be out hauling sometimes when it would come over me, just as if she'd suddenly appeared in the boat, and I'd sweat and wonder if it had all been a dream—the flat, the marriage, the letters and all. . . . If maybe it
was
battle fatigue that sent me up to that tenement to make a fool of myself. . . . I'd heard of these fantasies people invent to get them through a spot they don't think they can lick. I got to thinking maybe that was my trouble.”

“You know it was no fantasy,” Philippa said. “You'd like to think it was, probably, but you know it wasn't. You know, too, that there was a good reason why she didn't mention her past. She might have had a wretched childhood. She might have been an orphan. Perhaps she hated her work because it went against her grain—she was an artist in her heart and soul, I imagine. But circumstances had locked her into herself.” Her eyes were clear on his. “I don't think she ran away from you, Steve. I think something happened beyond her control. It might have been one of several things, death among them. But you would have set her free. On this island she would have found everything she lacked.”

“I kept the book open for ten years,” said Steve. He put out his hand and began to stroke her head with a gentle caressing motion; he touched her widow's peak, her temples, traced her eyebrows and the line of her nose. “I closed it because of you, standing in my sister's doorway and watching the Webster kids.” Then he lifted her face and kissed her. “I'm not a haunted house, if that's what you think, Philippa.”

“I don't think that,” she said. But she wasn't sure.

First I doubt myself, and then I doubt him, she thought with a bitter amusement. But the feel of his mouth on hers and the pressure of his fingers along her jaw resolved everything for now. She shut her eyes, wanting to sink into the moment as if into sleep.

S
he was working in her room that night when Foss and Helen Campion came to call. With her register shut and her radio on, their conversation was a blur, but sometimes Helen's voice pierced through.

Philippa had not met Helen or Foss face to face since the incident in the schoolroom. She had been disturbed by it, but there was no reason to suppose Mrs. Campion, once she had had her say, held a grudge. When her schoolwork was done, Philippa brushed her hair and put on fresh lipstick, and went downstairs.

The silence began in the kitchen as she started down the stairs. When she reached the doorway, Suze Campion was already manifesting the wan confusion Philippa had seen so often; she was hovering aimlessly around the stove, whisking off nonexistent crumbs with the turkey wing and trying to make the teakettle handle stand up straight. Helen Campion sat erect in her chair. She stared before her; her face had become very red. The men, in the captain's chairs drawn up to the stove, glanced around at Philippa. Asanath nodded.

“Shut up shop for the night, have ye?”

“Yes, and I thought I was just in time for a mug-up, but I guessed wrong.” Asanath did her the favor of smiling. But Foss, who had never spoken to her without the caress in his voice that showed his affectionate toleration of all women, looked right past her. The intention was as tangible as a slap, and she felt a physical reaction she had not felt when Helen came to the schoolroom.

Foss pushed back his chair and stood up. “Time we were pushing off.”

“Don't be in such a pucker to get under the kelp, boy,” said Asanath. “It'll be no day to haul tomorrow. Full moon, flood tide, and easterly. That's what it'll be.”

“Just the same, Asanath,” Helen said portentously, “we shouldn't have come out tonight. Peggy's so nervous lately. I'm thinking we'll have to take her to the doctor.”

“If she starts developing headaches,” Foss said grimly, “there'll be some actions around here, I can tell you that.”

“Oh, dear,” Suze murmured. The teakettle handle fell down with a small crash. Asanath, sighing, pushed himself up out of his chair and went to the door behind them. Suze gave Philippa a distracted glance and followed.

It was time that she talked with Asanath, Philippa thought. She sat down in the chair Foss had left, trying to ignore the murmur out in the entry. Once Helen's voice rose shrilly, “I
haven't
forgotten it, Asa Campion, and I won't! If your Terence was school age—and Vi said—” The squeal dropped all at once, as if Foss had prodded her. What had Vi to say, Philippa thought cynically. No one had bothered Ellie.

When Suze and Asanath came back, she said to him, “I didn't tell you what happened in school the other day, did I?”

He propped his foot on the stove hearth and sucked on a cold pipe. “No, you didn't,” he drawled. “No more'n you told me you'd fetched the Webster young ones into the fold. I heard right off, naturally. But I thought it was a queer kind of actions, you not telling me yourself.”

She said pleasantly, “Well, I didn't feel that there was anything to tell.”

“That ain't the way of it, according to my female relatives. They've been yammering around here for a week or more, and they don't show any sign of wearing out their lungs. They got more opinions than Congress conducting one of those investigations that cost us so much money. And it'll be only a matter of time before they get the rest of the women into it. For or against, it don't matter, it'll be a devil's broth however you look at it.” He leaned forward and pointed his pipe at her. “Tell me something, my girl. What in the name of Jupiter possessed you to stir up a mare's nest?”

“
I stirred
up a mare's nest?” She stood up. “Do you mean that?”

“Ayeh.” He watched her, she thought, with the stare of a marsh hawk on a high branch. She laughed disbelievingly.

“It doesn't seem possible that my interest in three harmless children should be the center of a storm. They should be in school, they're coming to school, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of it.”

“You're either awful innocent,” said Asanath, “or as crafty as some say you are.” He shook his head. “Why you couldn't let those kids alone, I'll never understand. But no, you had to go out of your way to seine 'em in, and I ain't had a minute's peace since.”

“Mr. Campion,” said Philippa courteously, “do you really think those children aren't fit to be with the others? Or are you objecting because you're being disturbed by the talk?”

“Waal. . . . Six of one and half dozen of the other, I guess. The kids are queer, and I don't hold with the view that all kids are pure and harmless just because they're under twenty-one. Neither should you, being a teacher. And for the other, well, in a place like this, small and cut off from the cont'nent, so to speak, if you haven't got peace in the community, you got nothing.”

“That's a very convincing argument, Mr. Campion. And nobody knows any better than I do that a child can be dangerous. I could tell some stories that would startle even you.” Come down off your high horse, she told herself. He's not your enemy, this should be a genuine exchange of ideas. She smiled at him. “I agree about peace. But what I can't understand—and maybe you can explain it to me—is why there should be any storm and strife at all. These youngsters are odd, yes, but they've never done any harm, have they?”

Suze burst out in a trembling voice, “What about that Edwin almost splitting Peggy's head open?”

“I don't suppose it's the first time somebody's been hit with a geography book in that schoolroom,” said Philippa, “or the last. It was wrong, I admit. But if Sky or Rob had done it, would it have been a criminal act?”

“I don't believe either of those boys has got criminal tendencies,” Asanath said ponderously. “With them it wouldn't lead to anything worse, most likely.”

“Edwin's wrong in his head, he can't even talk like a human being!” said Suze.

“Seems to me he's a matter for the state and not for you, my girl,” said Asanath.

She looked from one to the other of them. Suze returned her look, her light eyes swimming without expression behind her glasses, her mouth tucked into silence. Asanath filled his pipe, his expression mild enough. Between them, with less conscience and imagination than if Edwin had been a sick cat, they had disposed of a child. She wondered what difference it would make to them if they knew that Edwin was deaf. She couldn't tell them, ridiculous as the vow of secrecy was. Besides, to explain would mean to go into the whole pathetic history, and still they would not understand; they would only look at her and say,
You see, they are all crazy in that house
.

Asanath tamped tobacco with a long forefinger and said on a yawn, “Ayeh, you'd have done a lot better by yourself and the rest of us if you'd left 'em running wild in the woods.”

“
Wild
is right,” said Suze. “What kind of actions went on down there in that brush camp? That Rue's got a queer look. I wouldn't let her get near any child of mine.”

Perley's name was in Philippa's mouth; for a weird instant she thought she'd said it, but they had not changed, they were waiting complacently to see her submission. It took all her will power to speak in a suitable tone. “Of course I realize now just what I've done,” she said softly. “I can see that either I've lost my sense of values or I've never had a true one.”

Suze didn't grasp the irony. She wore a look of greedy satisfaction, as if she were already framing the words with which she would describe the scene; for once she would have something to tell Vi. Asanath put away his tobacco pouch and glanced across the stove at Philippa.

“It's not many folks who'd own up to being a fool and a meddler,” he said. He had not missed her irony but had met it with his own.

“Good night,” she said cheerfully, and went up to her room.

She was a long time getting to sleep that night. Nothing had been said, actually, that hadn't been said to her before. But this time Asanath Campion had said it. She had liked him from the first, she had liked him completely, and this made her sense of loss complete.

T
he next day was Halloween, and Philippa planned an afternoon of games and ghost stories. But the southeasterly storm had begun at daylight, and all morning the gusts of wind broke against the schoolhouse like heavy seas. The peak of the high tide wouldn't be until noon, but by half-past ten the water had passed the limits of a usual high tide. Ralph Percy had to go out back; when he returned he was jubilant.

“Hey, it's coming in from the Cove and over the marsh from the harbor!” he shouted.

“Gently, Ralph,” Philippa began, but no one heard her. They were all at the windows except for Daniel Webster, who looked around from his table with his long upper lip drawn down as if he didn't know whether to be amused or frightened.

“Come on, Dan'l,” Philippa said. They went to the windows and she lifted him up to see over the heads of the others. A sheet of water reflecting the sky's lusterless gray was spreading over the marsh from the harbor; the harbor was sheltered, and this shallow flood moved slowly over the grasses with no racing crests. Gusts of rain scudded across from Schoolhouse Cove. On the brow of the harbor beach, men splashed around in rubber boots and oilskins, starting dories out over the marsh.

“The way Ralph came in and yelled,” Kathie said languidly, “I thought it was a tidal wave. This isn't
anything
.”

“Go look in the schoolyard, Miss—” He rolled his eyes at Philippa and cleared his throat elaborately. “Mebbe you'll see a little water there, enough to suit your Royal Majesty. Those old combers are coming right at the sea wall. Probably sweep us off any time now.”