The Dawning of the Day (38 page)

“They say cuddy,” said Eric.

“That's right. I forgot.”

“What kind of an engine does she have?”

“I don't know.” She felt a damning sense of failure. “I didn't get a chance to ask,” she explained hurriedly.

“But you've been there since September,” Eric said with patient reproof.

“Well, it's a big engine,” she said tentatively. “Almost all of them have big engines. But there's one with a little old one-cylinder engine, and I don't believe she could go as fast as you can on your bike.”

Eric chuckled. In an instant he had been restored to her. The shadowy room had taken on a dim, comfortable safety. She said, “You know the boat that sank at her mooring. Well, they've got her up, and Mr. Gregg is fixing her bit by bit. She had a big hole in her planking, up near the bow.”

“Mm,” he said absently. “Gee, I'd like to ride in one of those big ones. Sometimes Tad and I ride our bikes down to the public landing, and we see the boats coming in. Gee, those big draggers at Universal Seafoods. . . . But I like the lobster boats best. Some of 'em are neat, boy. Hey, Mother, after you live in Maine three years, you can have a lobster license. There's a kid in school—well, he's in the seventh grade—and he had pots right in the harbor last summer. Right down here, with all those yachts and draggers and Coast Guard boats whizzing around. Golly!” He blew loudly. There was no need for her to make even a pretense of answering. He was off on one of his speaking reveries, his voice dreamed, and all that was required of her was to sit still and listen.

She turned her back on the window and the blank dark of the harbor; she shut her mind to the image of her island kitchen and the sound of feet on the stairs. This, in this room, was the reality. Here was the core of her existence.

On the afternoon after Thanksgiving she had an appointment with Jenny's dentist. It was not as bad as she had expected, and she came home feeling the mild exhilaration that is the peculiar aftermath of dental appointments. It was a cloudy day of quiet cold, and when she had gone out, the children had been trying noisily to decide between the cowboy picture at the Lux and the vaguely Arabian fantasy at the Metro; both had horses galloping for dear life across desert sands. Marjorie had been holding out with great fortitude for life among the beautiful veiled women and the gallant French Foreign Legionnaires, while the boys had abjured such trappings.

When Philippa reached home, they were gone. Jenny was drinking coffee before the living-room fire and reading. “Come in and collapse,” she invited. “Did he take your jaw off? Can you drink coffee, or do you have a brand new filling?”

“I think I can channel the coffee around it,” said Philippa. “Who won out on the movies?”

“Ha!” Jenny's eyes gleamed. “Wait till I tell you!” She sat forward to pour the coffee. She was not as tall as Philippa, and her features had a softer mold. Her fair hair curled around her face. She had lost the deceptively delicate appearance that had wrung boys' hearts, but now looked very pretty and domestic, like a poet's version of a good wife. She tucked in the corner of her mouth in a way Philippa knew well, and said, “A tall dark stranger won. When they laid eyes on him, they forgot all about movies. And he's abducted them like the Pied Piper.” She pointed her finger at Philippa. “You've been holding out on us, haven't you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Philippa sipped coffee carefully, bracing herself against an illogical excitement. “Who was it?”

“A man named Bennett,” said Jenny. She leaned back and gave Philippa a long meditative stare. “Phil, you've always been careful when you wrote not to mention this Steve any more than anyone else, but sometimes it struck me that you were a little too careful. I mean—well, sometimes sisters do have a sort of telepathy system between them, you know. And I've wondered about him. I didn't tell Roger, because you know how men are. He'd say I was seeing a beau for you behind every bush.” She laughed a little, but her eyes were as tender as they had ever been for Philippa. “But when I opened the door today and saw him standing there, I had a queer feeling even before he told me his name. I knew he'd come to see
you
, and that it was something more than casual.”

“Darling, you used to tell
me
I had a terrific imagination!” Philippa couldn't taste her coffee; she knew only that it was wet and she needed it for a drying and tightening throat.

“It isn't imagination in this case, Phil. Do you know, he knew right off which one was Eric? And the way he looked at him, such a long,
sweet
, serious look—” Her voice sounded odd. Philippa glanced up quickly and saw that Jenny's eyes were full of tears.

“Why, you old sentimentalist! Jenny, you amaze me!” But her laughter sounded false and breathy.

“I can't help it,” said Jenny belligerently. “He was so nice with the kids, and he took them all down to the harbor to see his boat. He was going to take them out as far as the breakwater in it. And I got to thinking how Eric hadn't ever known his father. And Phil!” She sat up, shedding one mood for another; it was Jenny's own, sometimes incomprehensible, trait. “Those island lobstermen make a good living. I don't have to tell you that, you've been out there. Why, when they come to the mainland, they spend hundreds of dollars, and then earn it back again in a week of good fishing. You could go farther and fare a lot worse than marrying a lobster fisherman.”

“Jenny Hathaway,” said Philippa. “You are shameless. You deserve everything that Roger would say to you if he could hear you.” She put down her coffee cup and stood up. “I don't know what Steve Bennett came here for, but I don't think he came to ask me to marry him. I'm going upstairs and lie down awhile. Dr. Elliot didn't drill very deep, but the very sound of that thing is shattering.”

Upstairs she washed her face in cold water and brushed her hair. She sometimes wondered how many million strokes her hair had had in her moments of stress; she remembered the hours after Justin's death when she sat brushing her hair and staring at nothing. The awakenings at dawn, when she sat up in bed in a cold room and brushed her hair because she did not smoke, and if one sat motionless, the grip of one's arms around one's knees gradually became a crushing vise and sent arrows of pain through the whole body. If she brushed her hair until first one arm and then the other was aching, her passion of grief was spent.

She looked in her mirror now and saw her brilliant eyes, her flushed cheeks. A number of fine pulses beat hard through her body. She tried consciously not to think Steve's name, but it clanged on and on, like the strokes of a clock gone wild. He had come; he and Eric were together. The other children didn't count.

She reasoned that he had come over from the island on an errand of his own, and through common politeness he would ask her if she wanted to go back with him. But the clamor still went on, and in the course of her reasoning she came to the window and looked down toward the harbor, straining unconsciously for a sight of his boat.

She was still in her room, going aimlessly from one thing to another, hating her indecision and yet wryly amused by the state she was in, when she heard the children come in downstairs. They were wildly excited, shouting like gulls. She put her ear against the door, listening for Steve's voice. At first she didn't hear it and was sickeningly disappointed. Then she heard Jenny's high, sweet, social tone.

“Children, cease and desist! We can't hear ourselves think. Do come in and sit down, Mr. Bennett. I'll call Philippa.” She trilled up the stairs in the blithely artificial fashion she had taken on at fourteen and never outgrown. Oh, for heaven's sake, Philippa thought in a sudden nervous spurt of irritation. She opened her door after a moment and went sedately down the stairs.

The lamps were lit and a new birch log was on the fire. Jenny smiled at her and put an arm tenderly around her waist. Steve stood by the mantel with Eric and Tad, looking at Roger's clipper model; he turned and looked across the room at them with a formal pleasantness. Philip-pa felt a thrill of dread. The whole scene was a re-creation of scenes that had caused some of the worst crises between her and Jenny, the older sister presenting the graceless and recalcitrant junior to the young man she had dredged up from her acquaintances. All that was missing was the chat in the bedroom beforehand, half wheedling and half menacing.
Now, Phil, darling, try to walk across the room like a lady, not like the captain of the girls' hockey team going up to bat or whatever it is they do . . . and for heaven's sake, be decent and show an interest in him. After all, you're darned lucky to get him for tonight
.

Philippa looked across the room at Steve, remembering the simplicity of their meetings on the island, and the whole situation became suddenly nonsensical. Jenny urging her by the pressure of her arm to be decent and show an interest, thinking she had a finger in the pie after all. It was all so idiotic. Her laughter was going to break loose in a moment, she knew it. She stepped skillfully away from Jenny's arm, reached out one hand to touch Eric's shoulder, and put the other one out to Steve.

“Hello, Steve,” she said.

“Hello, Philippa,” he answered. His fingers closed around her hand with an irrevocable tightness. “I've come to take you home.”

“That will be nice.” That will be nice. How simple it was in the last reckoning, in spite of Jenny beaming from the archway, and the children. She felt a splendid indifference to them all, not caring if they saw the knuckle-whitening clasp of Steve's hand and the sudden convulsive movement as if he would have pulled her toward him.

“You'll stay for supper, won't you?” Jenny was with them again, judging it was safe to pounce. “I'm sure the children can't bear to part with you, and Roger will want to meet you.” Steve let go of Philippa's hand, and Philippa turned smiling to Jenny. There was a calm exhilaration in the moment; in the old days she would have been seething by now.

“I'm sure he'll stay for supper, Jenny,” she said.

“Yay, stay!” shouted Tad, and Marjorie said, “Please!” Her tone was an echo of her mother's; she hadn't taken her eyes from Steve's face. Eric said nothing, but he looked around at Philippa and grinned.

“I'd like to stay,” said Steve.

“Oh, lovely!” cried Jenny. She crinkled her eyes at him, and then whirled like a ballerina toward the kitchen door. “Come, Marjorie, Tad! Eric, you can help too!”

“I'd like Eric for a moment,” Philippa said. Jenny gave her a brief, wary frown as if to say,
Why
can't you be cooperative, it's for your own good! Philippa looked at her blandly and held Eric back. The door shut behind Jenny and her children with a suggestive finality.

“What did you think of Steve's boat?” Philippa asked Eric. She remembered not to push his hair back or fuss with his collar. He held his thin, childish mouth still with an obvious effort; he could do nothing about his eyes.

“She's swell,” he said huskily. “Just swell.” He gazed at Steve with a lustrous, unbelieving awe, as if he had found himself suddenly in the same room with Robin Hood or Kit Carson.

“Some day Eric's going out to the island with me,” Steve explained to Philippa.

“That will be wonderful,” she said. She gave Eric a little push toward the door. “You'd better see what Aunt Jenny wants.” He went, looking back over his shoulder. His gaze moved seriously from one to the other. He seemed still to be moving in a dream. When he had gone, Steve took a step forward, reaching for her.

She went into his arms, shutting her eyes against their sudden burning. Her face felt unsteady. She put her hands on his shoulders, kneading with her fingers through layers of pull-over and shirt. “How did anyone with your disposition have such a nice kid?” he murmured.

“
My
disposition!” She felt slightly drunken. She had not forgotten what it was like to be this near to him, to move her temple back and forth against his jaw in urgency and wordless longing, but she had forgotten how intolerably sharp the edge of the instant could be. “My disposition,” she repeated dreamily, not remembering why she said it.

“The last time I saw you, it wasn't very good.” He barely spoke aloud.

“You called me a chowderhead.”

“You were one. You are one.” He folded his arms behind her and rocked her in them. His lips brushed her forehead and cheekbones. “Marry me, Philippa.”

“Yes, Steve.” It wasn't the way she'd wanted it; in Jenny's living room with the city outside, no sound of the rote seeping in past the windows. But the time and the place had no significance in the last analysis. She had said it finally, she had said it meaning it and wanting it, knowing they must not be separated again. All other issues must fall into place, and Eric was included among them.

As if he knew what she was thinking, Steve said, “We'll give Eric time to get used to the idea. Kids can't be rushed.”

“No.” She thought she heard Roger's car in the driveway. She loosened his arms, with the languid reluctance of awakening. “I love you, Steve.”

“And I love
you
.”

They were apart, Steve with his elbow on the mantel throwing a match into the fireplace and Philippa sitting in a chair, when Roger came in.

W
hen they went back to the island the next morning, the day was overcast but not windy. Behind them the mainland hills were purple-brown in their November coloring, and sharply lined against a pearly sky. The city dwindled to nothing; the lighthouses of the breakwater and then of Gannet Head were left behind, the closer islands fell away, and the bay opened before them. The gray sea glistened like pale silk.

Out here a gull rode solitary on a marker for the course which the destroyers followed on their trial runs. A big dragger passed near, heading home after a successful trip that put her low in the water. Now and then there was a lobster boat rolling in the sleek swells as the lobster-man hauled a trap. But nothing destroyed for Philippa the total effect of solitude with Steve. She had never been alone like this with him before, standing beside him at the wheel with her arm through his while the boat headed out toward the horizon.