The Dawning of the Day (37 page)

“Hello, Rue,” Philippa said. “I wondered when you were coming to call.”

“We stopped on our way home from school. Is it all right?”

“Of course it is.” Now she could deal with Kathie, but the moment of blankness had left an alarming memory. “Kathie, watching with glasses is as bad as eavesdropping. It's a wonder you don't learn lip reading. Then you'd be all set.”

Kathie grinned. “Gosh, why don't I?” She put the glasses back on the shelf beside the radio. “I wasn't gawking on purpose. We were just waiting for you, and then I saw you coming and I wanted to see how you looked in the glasses. You looked just like a movie star. You have an awful good walk, did you know it?”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” said Philippa. “I'll make some cocoa.”

Rue said nervously, “I can't stay.”

“You can stay fifteen minutes,” Kathie told her with an exasperating assurance that precluded all argument. Rue sat down again. There was a faint softening of added weight around her face, and she wore a skirt and blouse that made her look closer to her age. Her straight fair hair was tied back with a ribbon instead of bait-bag twine. She had not lost, and would not lose, the awareness that gave all her movements the subtle high-strung grace of something wild; and if she became as lost as her mother was, this particular quality would turn febrile and destructive.

Kathie was talking. “So I said,” she went on, “‘You can't tell me anybody's bothered Young Charles's gear because he would've gone out and cut off every one of
theirs
by this time. He's a real heller. He doesn't give a damn.'”

“Kathie,” Philippa said mechanically. Kathie grinned.

“I love the geranium your mother brought down,” Philippa said to Rue. “I went up to thank her the other day, but she wasn't home.”

There was a shadowy line between Rue's brows. “Maybe she was asleep. She doesn't go out anywhere.”

“She
must
have been asleep,” Philippa agreed. She wished she hadn't mentioned Mrs. Webster. Her sense of oppression deepened. Just how much had she done for Rue after all? Perhaps Rue was doomed by her own sensitivity; in five years she could be burned out, a gaunt fey eccentric tending her mother in the frightened seclusion the woman had already built around them.

Kathie rattled on while they drank their cocoa, her bright brash voice clattering against Philippa's ears. Rue watched with noncommittal amber eyes over the rim of her cup; she followed Kathie's every move as if she couldn't look away. If Rue could catch some of Kathie's egotism, now. . . . But Philippa was too tired to go further with the thought. The week had been one enormous exertion, half as long as eternity. She wished the girls would go and leave her alone; or that she herself could go. If the mail boat were at the wharf this instant, she thought, I would go aboard it. It was a brave and stimulating idea, even though she knew that if the boat
were
there, actually, she would not go aboard; there was only a half week left of school before the Thanksgiving vacation.

Rue was ready to leave, and she stood by the door. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Marshall. I have to go home now.”

“Well, I do too.” Kathie stood up and stretched. Her cowboy belt slipped down an inch from her lean middle. She hitched it up again. “I'm supposed to keep store this afternoon. Mark's going to throw me out, come the first snowstorm, if I don't tend to my chores better.” She chuckled, and thumped down the stairs. Rue waited for an instant. Then, with a darting, furtive gesture, she reached into her coat pocket and brought out a wad of papers.

“Here's some things I wrote,” she whispered huskily. “I thought maybe you'd see if they were all right.” She pushed the papers into Philippa's hand and then ran down the stairs.

Philippa opened the package and looked at the first paper. It was a poem, called “The Gray Wind.” The first line read, “There is a wind that comes over the sea.”

Tears came into Philippa's eyes. She could not have explained them; she was not a sentimentalist. But it was really more than she deserved for her frailties, to have a handful of poems thrust at her at the end of the day.

She sat down at the table and began to read them.

T
he last day of school before Thanksgiving was mild and still, with a smoky haze along the horizon. The sun came through the filmy overcast with a pale warmth. School closed at noon, and Philippa left on the
Ella Vye
. She expected to be the only passenger, and she was surprised to see Nils Sorensen swing aboard with a small canvas zipper bag in his hand.

Joanna, kneeling on the edge of the wharf to talk to Philippa, at the
Ella
's stern, seemed to be trying not to laugh. She moved her head cautiously toward Perley, who lounged against a hogshead a little apart from the others on the wharf. “He's been watching Nils,” she whispered. “Nils is going in to see about an infected finger, and he'll be out tomorrow morning on the lobster smack, but before night somebody will be saying he's gone to get the rest of the Bennetts to come home and start fighting. As soon as Perley's sure that Nils really went off on the Boat today, he'll be around the harbor in a flash . . . if you can imagine Perley moving like a flash.”

Philippa smiled with her face, and wondered if Steve was staying out of the harbor purposely until she should be gone. Some of the other men had already come in from hauling. Young Charles gave her a dozen lobsters in a cardboard carton; he held her hand, regardless of the others watching, and said huskily, “Don't forget to come back.”

“I shan't.” She worked her hand gently free. Her whole body strained backward without moving outwardly, listening and watching for Steve. There was still a chance for him to come around the point. She tried to concentrate on the others, on Kathie wigwagging from up on the wharf, on Mark Bennett pegging lobsters on the big floatlike car, on what Joanna was saying. The Webster children stood in a little cluster apart from the rest. She must say a special good-by to them, even though it was only for a few days.

When it was all said, Steve still hadn't come. The Diesel engines were starting up. Philippa turned her back on the wharf and pretended to see if her suitcase was securely fastened. The voices, the gulls, the engine sounds, all blurred into a steady din in her ears, and when she looked once more at the harbor mouth, the sun burned in her eyes. She was despairing and afraid, not so much because Steve hadn't come, but because of the depth of her disappointment.

Then she settled herself on the bench across the stern, looking as if she expected to enjoy her trip, and waved to the people on the wharf across the widening and bubbling strip of water.

She didn't see Steve's boat between Bennett's and Brigport. Two men came aboard at the bigger island, one obviously a salesman and the other a fisherman dressed in his shore clothes. They went up into the pilothouse where Nils and the captain were. There were no other women to share the sunny solitude of the stern, and so Philippa came without interruption to what seemed a necessary and logical premise; if she had not been so miserable, she would have congratulated herself on her clear thinking.

He never really loved me, she thought. He was lonely, and he thought I was lonely too. He tried to make something out of nothing, but he must know by now that it would never do for him. She looked back across the pale satiny sea to the mauve haze that veiled the island from her, and the facts moved on irrevocably. . . . Vinnie is the one, she thought. I never had a chance.

They were within clear view of the mainland, and the hills were changing color against the sky, when Nils came astern and sat down beside her on the bench. He gave her his slow warm smile and said, “I thought I'd better show up before we reach the breakwater. Jo told me to be sure to talk to you on the trip.”

“That's not fair,” she protested. “Why should you have to bother with me instead of staying with the men?” Joanna was sorry for her, she thought; Joanna had guessed at the break between her and Steve.

“It's no bother,” Nils was saying. He held out his cigarettes to her and lit one for himself. Watching him, she thought how much she liked his square-cut ruddy face and thoughtful dark blue eyes. In his fairness he all but shone among the dark Bennetts. “I wish I'd come astern sooner,” he said. “It was pretty tough in the pilothouse, hemmed in between Link's cigar and that rope salesman who got on at Brigport. He had a lot of jokes—real hot stuff, he kept telling us—and he had to tell each one twice, because Theron Pierce is deaf as a haddock.”

“Were they funny jokes?” Philippa asked.

He gazed at the match solemnly before he threw it overboard. “No,” he said. Then he looked directly at her. “Is Steve coming in for you Sunday?”

She answered too quickly, “No, I'll be on the
Ella
, Saturday.” She felt the heat rising in her neck and face. He would see it and read his own interpretation into it. He must know there was something wrong between her and Steve, if Joanna knew it.

“Then you
are
coming back,” he said gently.

“Of course.” She smiled. “Unless you all get together while I'm gone and decide to discharge me on grounds of moral turpitude. I incite riots and tell people to drop lead into other people's engines.”

“Good Lord! What have you got to do with that?” He was staring at her in genuine astonishment; then he burst into laughter. “Foss has been on our necks about Charles, but I didn't know you were in on it. You're what Syd calls a femmy fatallie, aren't you? Leading poor weak males astray!” He was still laughing. Then he turned serious and said, “Charles won't admit anything, but he's the one who tampered with Foss's engine, all right. We've read him the riot act about any more such nonsense, so maybe now he thinks he's got even for his traps and can leave well enough alone. None of us wants to get into a tangle down there and lose our summer's work.”

They were almost into the big harbor, and he began pointing out landmarks along the shore and naming off the hills behind the city. His orderly presence was subtly calming; it had driven away the anguish that had begun to wrench at her a little while ago, and now she wore a shell of cheerful composure over her sadness.

T
he children rushed around the house to meet the taxi, and Jenny came out on the steps. They were all far more effusive than Eric, who stood a little to one side while his cousins hugged her; then he gravely received her kiss, and at once started upstairs with her bags. Her first thought on seeing him was, How he has changed. He seemed to have grown both taller and heavier, his slightness was becoming a lithe, springy slenderness accentuated by the dungarees and cowboy shirt. Even the back of his neck was changing; it had always seemed such a slim babyish neck, with the brown drake's tail curling on it, and now it had a sturdiness like the set of his shoulders. I suppose it's from riding a bicycle so much, she thought irrelevantly, trying to curb the first instinctive dismay. He was getting to be like other boys; he spoke in curt monosyllables. He smiled at her with a conventional motion of his lips and didn't look at her for very long. It was the right way for him to be. He had passed into a different world, as he had changed from one to another with his first day in kindergarten.

Just before supper she escaped Jenny, saying she would tell more about the island at the table, and went up to her room. She sat by her window looking out across the bare elms and the street lights glimmering in the dusk at the great mysterious dark of the harbor. The light on the breakwater sliced through it at intervals. Eric was down in the cellar with the other children. Philippa sat alone in the dark, ordering her thoughts. Steve and Eric were inextricably entwined. She remembered with what happy innocence she had contemplated her new job at Bennett's Island, how she had looked from this window without knowing how the island looked on the sea, without knowing how the people lived, worked, thought. Now she was no longer innocent or happy, and the change in Eric suddenly seemed abnormal; in this oppressive mood she saw it as one with Steve's aloofness. She thought, in fright, Suppose that Eric has turned on me too, that he's had some psychic warning about Steve. There was a more logical reason; Roger and Jenny might have made joking remarks.
There seems to be a lot about this Steve in your mother's letters, Eric
.

But she could hardly believe they would do it, and the psychic idea was idiocy. Eric was simply becoming all boy, he was becoming independent of her in an ordinary way. She leaned her forehead against the cold windowpane and shut her eyes, and thought, In a little while no one will need me. Steve's face came before her, smiling intimately and tenderly, the way Justin's face used to come to her in her dreams after he was killed.

Someone tapped at her door and then turned the knob gently. “Are you asleep, Mother?” Eric whispered hoarsely.

She sat up. “No, just resting. Come in, dear. Is supper ready?”

“No, I just came up.” He shut the door and came toward her, like a small ghost in the dusky room.

“I'm glad you did. I was just thinking about you. Bring the hassock over.”

He dragged it across the floor and sat down near her. The faint light reflecting up from a street light just below the window glimmered in his eyes. The particular scent of boy, overlaid with the odor of soap and dampened hair, came to her. Her fingers realized in anticipation the way his hair would feel, and the heated tightness of his bone and flesh under the fringed shirt. He was near enough to touch, but she would not touch him yet.

“Mother,” he said tensely. “You never wrote me how long the boat was you went hauling in.”

“Thirty-eight feet, I think.” Exhilarated, she rushed into facts. “It's painted white with a buff deck. It has a nice cabin.”