That Camden Summer (5 page)

"Roberta " ... then sell chances on when you'll finally rot and drop off. "

Elfred covered his mouth with one hand and smiled behind it while she stewed in tight-lipped anger.

"Oh, come on, Birdy, at least go in and have a look."

She was so distraught she got out of the automobile without an umbrella and marched up the weedy yard without waiting for anyone.

"Shoo!" she yelled at the gulls. "Get your streaky asses off my front porch!" Elfred quickly turned off the engine and rushed to catch up with her with an umbrella. He did so at the bottom of the porch steps where she had come up short and set her teeth to keep from cursing at him. Upon closer scrutiny it appeared the porch itself would rot off before Elfred did! The floor had holes in it where feet had gone right through. She stood with her hands on her hips.

"This is deplorable. Just deplorable."

Elfred urged her up the steps, picked his way across the good boards and opened the front door. She preceded him into what she supposed was a parlor. Wonder of wonders

- it had electricity! But the wires were strung outside the walls and the bulbs hung bare. There were newspapers everywhere. The walls had been papered with them. The old man had collected

them and they stood in sagging stacks around the edges of the room along with empty glass jars and more of the Portuguese floats. Soot stained the ceiling above a heater stove, and trash littered the floors. The place stank of urine and decay.

Roberta announced, "I want my money back." "I can't get it back," Elfred told her. "The sale is conclusive."

Roberta marched up to him, grabbed his folded umbrella and jabbed it smartly into his belly. Elfred doubled forward and grunted.

"Oof! ... Ro-Roberta ... what in the "How are we supposed to live in this? How, Elfred! Would you tell me that!" she yelled.

Elfred hugged his belly and stared at her, aghast. The girls had come onto the front porch and stood looking in dubiously. Rebecca stepped over the threshold and the others followed, picking their way carefully. Susan peered up a creaky-looking stairway that divided the two downstairs rooms. Rebecca walked over to a wall and peeled a strip of newspaper off, revealing ancient water-stained wallpaper behind it. "It won't be so bad, Mother. Once we burn the newspapers and paint the walls."

Rebecca, however, was always the optimistic one.

"It's unfit for a polecat!"

A kitchen adjoined the living room. Lydia ventured into it and the others followed. She opened a door beneath a dry sink, releasing a fetid odor. What appeared to be a slop pail - empty, by some benevolent freak of

bathroom."

fate - had left a permanent stain in the wood of the floor.

"Close that door, Lydia!" Roberta snapped. "And don't touch that filthy thing again. He probably pissed in it, for all we know!" To Elfred she snapped, "I suppose there's no

"No. Just an outhouse."

She turned away, too angry to face him. "Listen, Birdy, you said two hundred dollars. This is what you get for two hundred dollars."

"Two hundred dollars I could have spent on something livable while financing the rest with a mortgage. "

"You told me you didn't want a mortgage, so I figured it could be repaired with a little help. "

She spun on him, pointing at a wall. "You repair it then, Elfred, because I don't have time! I've got to go out and earn a living for my girls! And while I do it, am I supposed to leave them in this?" She was shouting by this time, gesturing rabidly. " You stuck us with this skunk's nest! You make it livable! And while you're at it, you pay to make it livable! Lord help me, I trusted you, Elfred! "

Elfred was backing away because Birdy was brandishing the umbrella again. He spread both hands as if to ward her off. "All right, Birdy, all right ... I will. I'll take care of it. "

"And do it quickly, because this is no fit lodging for my girls!"

"Very well, I'll see Gabriel Farley right away." "Yessir, you will," said a deep voice from the front room, and Gabriel Farley himself

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materialized. He stepped through the doorway into the kitchen and said, "Hello again."

"Well, where did you come from?" Elfred asked.

"Figured you could use me. If these ladies were going to live in old Sebastian's wake, it'd have to be fixed up some." He crossed his arms, cinched his hands beneath his armpits and scanned the tops of the walls. "Wouldn't mind giving you an estimate."

Roberta brushed off her palms and shot him an acid glance. "Well, that was fast," she remarked dryly.

"Lucky thing we met at the wharf or I wouldn't have known this place was going to be lived in again."

Roberta wondered just how lucky. "So you're a carpenter, Mr. Farley?" "Carpenter, painter, general tradesman all

rolled into one. I can fix most things."

Her glance shifted from one man to the other. "Couldn't be you two are in cahoots now, could it? Like maybe Elfred just happened to purchase this wreck for me, and maybe Mr. Farley just happened to be conveniently coming into the steamship office as we were standing there, and now he just happens to have the time on his hands to repair this piece of junk. At what kind of inflated prices, might I ask?"

Farley said nothing, only stood as before with his hands clamped under his armpits, studying her from beneath his wiry eyebrows. He was big, and the oilskins made him look bigger. He was calm, and his spraddle-legged stance made

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him look calmer. He had feet the size of dories that made him look as if nothing could tip him over. But no overgrown lummox was going to intimidate Roberta Jewett.

"Well, am I right, Mr. Farley?"

Gabe Farley, unruffled, turned to study Roberta Jewett more closely. First divorced woman he'd ever seen, and he wasn't sure what to make of her. There she stood, confronting him and Elfred with her suspicions, just like a man would do. No fear, no compunctions, just out with it! Didn't care much about her appearance either - that was evident right from the get-go. Stood there with her hair looking like a patch of swamp grass after a hurricane and her coat all crinkled and hanging unbuttoned. No hat, no gloves, no prissy posturing. She stood with her feet just about as widespread as Gabe's own, and he thought, Whew! Are the women going to be talking about this one behind her back! The men, too.

"Well, now, Mrs. Jewett, you could be right," he said, one-handedly removing his cap and scratching his skull. He angled the cap across his temple again and tugged the brim down till it hid his right eyebrow. "Could be wrong though, too, so I guess it's up to you to decide if you want my help or not. "

"Well, answer me straight, Mr. Farley. Are you in cahoots with my brother-in-law?" "Nope."

She had expected a lengthier denial. Surprised by his monosyllabic reply, she turned away.and wandered the room. "Well, even if you are, I

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guess there's no problem because Elfred just agreed to finance the repairs on this house, didn't you, Elfred? You see, Mr. Farley, I don't have any money. Well, that's not exactly true. I had four hundred, but Elfred took two to buy this junk heap, leaving me with two hundred, which I intend to use to buy a motorcar."

"A motorcar," Farley repeated, the way an uncle would say to a five-year-old, "To Africa

you laugh at me, Mr. Farley!" not laughing at you."

"Yes, you are. I'm not an idiot, nor am I incapable of making decisions for me and my girls, and I've decided I shall own a motorcar-, come hell or high water."

"Bully for you, but we're not settling the question of whether or not you want me to repair this house."

"Ask Elfred. He got me into this mess. He can get me out."

Elfred cleared his throat and came forward. "Go ahead, Gabe, work up an estimate and bring it to me. We'll work it out somehow between Roberta and me. She's got to live somewhere, and this - I'm afraid - is it."

"All right, I'll look around. Excuse me," he said to Roberta, touching his cap and leaving the room.

The girls had gone exploring, and two of them called from the front porch. "Mother, come out here! "

She went to join Rebecca and Susan, who were standing at the porch rail, looking out

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through the rain. "Look, Mother," Becky said enthusiastically, "we'll be able to see the harbor from here, and all the boats, and the islands. I'm sure we'll be able to see them once the rain clears. And the sunrises! Oh, they'll be stunning, Mother! just imagine, this railing and floor fixed, and our old wicker out here, and something with a delicious smell blossoming there beside the steps" - she jumped over two broken boards and turned at the far end of the porch - "and maybe a hammock here in the shade, for hot summer afternoons, and I'll write a poem about the harbor and stand right here at the top of these steps as if this were the stage at the Opera House and deliver it for you while you recline on the cool grass with your toes bare and your throat lifted to the sky." She turned to her mother in appeal. "I know it looks bad now, but we don't care. We love it. We want to stay. "

"We've already picked out our room," Susan put in.

Roberta studied her daughters a moment. If there was one force that could stop Roberta on a dime, it was her girls. She was here. She had bought this rattletrap. They - bless their ignorance - thought it could be a home for them. Suddenly she bent back from the waist and laughed. "Who says I'm poor when I have riches like you? Come here, girls." She opened her arms. They came and nestled up against her and linked their arms around her waist. There they stood, like three fishermen's knots in the same rope, watching a lacework of rain skim off

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the porch roof and peck into the sodden earth below. The scent of fecund soil was primal, and the touch of the air rich and damp with the promise of summer's green. The mountain at their backs protected them from the prevailing southwest winds. The earth dropped before them., and with it the houses and trees and commerce between them and Penobscot Bay. Below and to the right a section of roof on the Knox Woolen Mill presented a sheeny sheet of slate, and beside it the brick smokestack knifed up into the drear heavens where rain-mist shifted like smoke.

A mackerel gull banked past, bleating a series of raucous yells, then flapped wings while settling onto the weather vane of a shed roof in a yard below. Roberta watched it all the way, till it perched and stopped shifting its tail. In Boston they had lived too far from the water. Gulls spoke differently inland than they did within sight of the ocean. The Atlantic's presence gave these gulls a brashness she loved. Nobody could tell a Camden gull it must be quiet, or obedient, or proper, or that it must conform, or that it could not fly singly.

Maybe she'd taken her cue from the gulls. "I'll need some help from you if we stay," Roberta told her two older girls.

"Sure, Mother."

"Of course, Mother."

"And we won't have much, I can tell you that right now. But neither will you be working in that mill." She looked down on the dark gray slate roof.

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"We don't need much.," Rebecca assured her.

"You'll be alone a lot. Do you mind?" "Who's the one who taught us 'When you have imagination, you're never alone'?"

"That's my girl." She jostled Rebecca, then both girls at once.

The mackerel gull came back, still alone, still scolding. She watched its black eye gleam and its head twist in curiosity as it balanced above them, looking them over.

"Houses have never been very important to me," she commented. "Long as they're warm and dry and have a modicum of laughter in them, and maybe some books and music, that's enough, right?"

"Right," the girls replied in unison. "So we'll stay."

Rebecca's and Susan's grips tightened on her waist, and Roberta fixed in her mind that she'd made the right decision. That's all it took was deciding it was so, and from that moment on she'd be content with her decision.

"Where's Lydia?" "Upstairs exploring." "Shall we go find her?"

Smiling, the three went to do just that.

Lydia was indeed exploring the house. She had read some of the newspaper headlines on the wall from as long ago as thirty years. She had culled some colorful glass floats from

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the flotsam left behind by Sebastian Dougal. They were scarlet and aqua blue and saffron yellow and would look just dandy hanging on the porch rail in the summer. She set her favorite one at the bottom of the stairs, then looked up, daydreaming, humming. "Sorry her lot who loves too well . . . " Earlier that year, at her school in Boston, she had played the part of Josephine in H.M.S Pinafore and was transported now to a ship on the briny sea. Dreaming of it, she doubled over with her forehead on her elbow and ran her entire arm up the gouged handrail, humming all the way to the top. "Heavy the sorrow that bows the head . . . " she sang as she idled her way into the rear bedroom, the one that looked out at Mount Battie. Its ceiling followed the steep roofline, and on one end it had a pair of long, skinny windows that reached to within inches of the floor. Before them, Mr. Farley was on one knee, examining the wall around the window and whistling very softly between his teeth. His whistling sounded like ducks' wings when they flew low over your head.

"Hello," she said.

He stopped whistling and looked back,over his shoulder. "Oh, hello."

"I'm Lydia."

He pivoted on the balls of his feet and let his weight settle onto one heel, resting his forearms on his knees, letting his hands dangle between them.

"It's nice to meet you, Lydia. I'm Mr. Farley."

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"I know. Are you going to fix this house for us?"

"I think so."

"It's quite a mess, isn't it?"

He let his gaze rove as if following the shape of a rainbow. "Oh, I don't know. It's not so bad." He pointed with a knuckle while keeping the wrist over the knee. "That window in the other bedroom needs replacing, and it looks like it'll need almost a whole new front porch, but the roof is shingled with slate, and she's good for another hundred years."