That Camden Summer (4 page)

Rendering a grin that would have charmed the scowl off a Quaker matron, he doffed his bowler and motioned her ahead of him down the walk. "As you wish. Shall we join the children?"

He drove them through the rain in his shiny black touring car. In the backseat the girls were agog, testing the seat springs, exploring the vase on its bracket between the doors and asking Elfred if it had a Klaxon, and would he toot it.

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He did so once while Roberta kept to her corner of the front seat and looked out her window.

"So, what do you think of our electrics?" he inquired.

"Electrics?" "The streetcars."

"Oh. Well, they've certainly changed the town, haven't they?"

"Pretty progressive for a town this size, wouldn't you say?"

She watched a passing streetcar as it clicked by. "Have you ridden one yet?51

"Certainly. Everybody rides the electrics. Quickest way to get over to Rockland and Warren."

"Quicker than in your motorcar?" "Well, I wouldn't say that, no."

"So many motorcars." After watching one pass, she turned sharply to question her brotherin-law. "Do you like yours, Elfred?"

"I do, but some of my customers refuse to get into it. People still think the horse is more reliable. "

"Do you?" "No. "

She may not have approved of Elfred on a personal level, but everything Grace had ever written about the man assured Roberta he had more than a pretty head on his shoulders. 9CS0,15 she asked, "if you were a woman, you'd get a motorcar instead of a horse?"

"Oh, now wait a minute, Birdy, don't tell me you're thinking of buying a motorcar!"

"Why not?"

"But you're a woman!))

She released a snort that told Elfred this wasn't his subservient wife to whom he was talking.

"With plans of my own."

"Be careful, Roberta. People will talk." "About what? My getting a motorcar?" "Well, you're divorced, Birdy." He had

lowered his voice to an undertone. "You have to be more careful than most."

"There's no need to whisper, Elfred. My girls know I'm divorced, and they know the world takes a dim view of divorced women, don't you, girls?"

"Our father was never home anyway3" Lydia piped up.

"And when he was-, all he did was take money from Mother and disappear again," added Rebecca. "But the last time she refused to give him any. "

"We think it's a good thing that she divorced him.," put in Susan.

Roberta might have acted the slightest bit smug as she remarked, "It's been my experience, Elfred, that people will talk on general principles, usually because they haven't enough in their own lives to keep them occupied. That's the chief reason people put their noses into other people's business. Do me a favor, would you, Elfred? Take me down Main Street."

"V,7hat for?"

"I want to see what it looks like." "It looks the same as always."

"It does not. Grace has written about all kinds

of changes. I want to ride its full length and see them all ... unless, of course, you feel your reputation would be sullied by being seen with a divorced woman."

Her sarcasm, on the heels of Elfred's attempted hanky-panky, was taken as a challenge. "Very well. One quick trip, then it's back up the hill to Alden Street."

"Very well, Elfred," she said with mock servitude, and sat back to enjoy the ride through the town where she'd grown up.

Even in the rain5 Camden appealed. The mountains rose behind it in gentle curves, the little village looped at their throat like a necklace. Camden's shape was dictated by the horseshoe curve of rocky coastline that formed a calm, natural harbor made all the more calm by dozens of outlying islands that dotted Penobscot Bay and broke the backs of even the greatest storm-blown breakers threatening the Atlantic coastline.

In the years since Roberta had left ' many yachting enthusiasts from the larger New England cities had discovered safe little Camden Harbor and had made it their home port. The masts of their pleasure craft now shared moorings with Camden's own fishing fleet, though at this time of day - midmorning

- the working boats were gone, along with their owners, poles and nets, out onto the rainy water to earn a living.

"In Boston," Roberta said _' "we lived inland. It's good to be close to the water again. The sounds and smells are different by the water."

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They sat for a moment beside the town docks, rocked by the engine of Elfred's touring car. Through the windows came the toccata of hammers from the shipyards, the polyphony of gulls, the contralto note of a lonely boat engine as the craft headed out. "Listen," said Roberta to her girls. "It's playing a composition."

"What is?" Elfred asked, but Roberta flapped a hand to shut him up while she and her girls

- who understood without question - listened to the serenade of the seaside town. The salt air pressed heavily, like a cold, damp cloth against their faces. It smelled of rocks draped with seaweed that soured at low tide, the wood of docks swelled by years of dampness and the faint stench of the lime-burning kilns that drifted up from Rockport whenever the wind was out of the southwest.

When they'd heard enough, Roberta said, "Let's go, Elfred. Show me Main Street." Main curved like an eel and climbed at the

north end. The white wooden structures of the business section that Roberta remembered from childhood were gone, destroyed by fire in 1892. In their place were two- and threestoried buildings of red Maine brick. Though the buildings were different, the character of the town remained the same. Its roots had been put down by Calvinists, who valued hard work, Sunday worship and a sheltered seaport. If that port were of exceptional beauty, so much the better. If it faced the homeland where the town founders had left their loved ones-, better still.

Roberta, like any traveler returning home,

searched for familiar landmarks. On the white spire of the Baptist church the town clock still set the pace of daily life. Beside it the Village Green remained unchanged. Down at the Bean shipyard a four-master stood on the stocks, half completed, just like when she was a child. The little Megunticook River still plummeted over the falls at the head of the harbor, still passed the woolen mills, still turned its machinery. And the mill still reigned over the entire town, presumably with children on its payroll.

But progress had come to Camden in more than just its electric trolleys. A motor bus from the Elms Hotel came toward them, headed for the wharf with its load of outbound tourists. Telephone poles trimmed the length of Main Street. Concrete sidewalks followed the poles. There were water hydrants and streetlights and a new, expensive YMCA building. But the sign that snapped Roberta's head around swung from a building at the north end of Main where it curved upward to become Belfast Road.

"Elfred, did that sign say 'Garage'?" "Now, Roberta, don't even think it."

"But it did! Turn around and go back there, Elfred, I insist!"

"Roberta, don't be silly."

"Damn and blast you, Elfred, when I say turn this car around, I mean it!"

In the backseat the girls started giggling. Rebecca said, "I think she means it, Uncle Elfred. "

With a long-suffering sigh, Elfred braked, shifted gears and swung into a U-turn. While he

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waited for a carriage to pass, he said, "Roberta, I understand that you haven't had to answer to a man for a long time, but this time you must listen. Women simply cannot own cars because they cannot operate them."

"And just why not?"

They began rolling again, back into downtown. "Because you can break your arm cranking them. And because gasoline is heavy and clumsy to put in, and the motors break down quite regularly, and the carburetors need constant adjusting, and the dam things are cold in the winter and have been known to catch fire and burn right to the ground! And tires need patching, sometimes right out on the road, and what if that happens when you're all by yourself somewhere with no man to assist you? Roberta, please, be sensible."

"How much does a motorcar cost, Elfred?" "You aren't listening to me."

"I'm listening. I simply am not agreeing until I explore the possibility further because, you see, I've thought about this for a long time. It's been a part of my plan. How much does one cost?"

He refused to answer.

"I can find out quite easily."

"All right," he said, exasperated. "This one cost eight hundred and fifty dollars. A roadster would be about six hundred, or thereabouts."

"I don't have that much, but nevertheless, I intend to buy one. I'll get the money somehow." "Don't be ridiculous, Birdy. You cannot." "Why not? You have."

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"Yes, but I'm a man. Men can handle them."

"Oh, Elfred," she replied indignantly, "how you insult me without half trying."

"Birdy, you are the most exasperating woman!" "Pull over." And after a beat, "Pull over, Elfred, I said!"

He did so, grumbling. "How you and Grace can be sisters is beyond me."

Elfred pulled over and stopped in front of the Boynton Pharmacy. The sidewalk was brand new-, and the car tilted slightly toward it while the engine continued to chortle and rock the car rhythmically. On the leather roof the rain sounded like grease spattering. It scrolled down the isinglass windows and turned the view of the buildings across the street into wavery images, like a washed-out watercolor.

Roberta squinted and put her face closer to the window. "Boynton's Motor Car Company," she read aloud. "Glory be, Elfred, you bought it right here?" Elfred refused to answer. The answer was obvious anyhow. Beneath that sign hung another: CAMDEN GARAGE. The smaller print on both signs was made illegible by the downpour.

"Girls, can you read that?"

Rebecca tried. "Not very well." She squinted. cc ... agency ... storage ... that's all I can make out. "

"Storage? Do they store motorcars here, Elfred?"

"In the winter, yes, when it gets too cold to drive them and the roads become impassable."

"Where does one buy gasoline?"

"Birdy, please ... your sister is going to be very upset with me if she thinks I assisted you with this crazy idea."

"Don't worry, Elfred, I shall absolve you of all wrongdoing. I'll make sure Grace knows that anything disgraceful was clearly my idea."

Elfred was beginning to realize this woman had a tongue like a double-bit axe and very much enjoyed nicking him with it in the hope that he'd squirm. But Elfred was no squirmer. He liked women, and this one in particular whetted his interest, with her single state, her sassiness, occasional cursing and footloose ways. No man in his right mind would want her on a permanent basis - no wonder George Jewett had bolted - but as a distraction from a boring, overweight wife, Mrs. Birdy Jewett would do very well. Elfred began to anticipate the days ahead.

"One buys gasoline at the hardware store. Now may I take you home?"

Roberta grinned smugly and settled back against the seat as if a decision had been made. "Please do."

Alden Street was a mere stone's throw above downtown. The Breckenridge house was as old as Camden itself and during the last two decades had been owned by the final survivor of the clan, one Sebastian Dougal Breckenridge. Sebastian had spent his productive years at sea, and the sea

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had been his only bride. He had been content to live out his last rheumatic days within view of the ocean, where he could look down and see the steamers enter the harbor, watch the fishermen go out each morning and return each evening, listen to the gulls scold as they banked past his windows and remember his salty youth plying the trade routes across the bounding main.

People around town remembered the days when Sebastian had kept his place shipshape, when petunias had flowered in the beds beneath the front windows, when the anchor that lay scuttled in the soil of the front yard had been kept a glistening white. But many years had passed since Sebastian's creaky old joints could endure the torture of kneeling to weed a garden, or his arthritic arms support a paintbrush, or his feeble mind remind him that the house needed care if it was not to tumble down the hill into Camden Harbor.

Roberta gaped at the place and felt her stomach drop. "This is it?"

"Holy smut," one of the girls whispered, followed by only silent disbelief from the backseat.

"Elfred, you can't be serious. You spent my money on that!"

"Two hundred dollars isn't much, Birdy. I could have gotten you a much nicer place on Limerock Street for four hundred, but you said two was your limit."

Two hundred for the house, two hundred for the motorcar, that was what she had planned. Now she owned a hovel and could afford exactly

one-third of a car, and had no way of getting the rest quickly.

"Oh, Elfred, how could you? Why, it's nothing more than a ... a derelict! "

"It's got a good sturdy foundation, and wood stoves that work, and windows that close." "Without glass," she said ' looking up. On

the second floor one pane had been covered with a sheet of wood. Surely the place had not been painted in a decade. Not by anything except gull shit. There was plenty of that on the shingles, and below the window ledges, and across the front of a shallow front porch where a line of birds trimmed the railing whose spokes were as irregular as an old sea dog's teeth. Through the lower-level windows Roberta glimpsed the effects of Sebastian Dougal Breckenridge - predominantly what looked to be stacks of newspapers and glass floats from Portuguese fishing nets lining the sills.

"Glass can be replaced," Elfred said of the upstairs window.

"Not by me, it can't. I'm no glazier, Elfred!" Roberta's disillusionment was fast growing into blazing anger.

"You said you had three good helpers-, so I took you at your word, that you wanted to save money on a structure that could be fixed up. I assumed that you had set aside some money for that purpose."

"Well, I didn't! Not this much! I said fix up, Elfred, not rebuild!"

Roberta sat glaring at her new domicile. "Do you want to go in and look?"

"No. I want to suspend you from the tallest tree in Camden ... by your heel tendons, Elfred Spear! "