The Ebbing Tide (27 page)

Everybody came. Gram Fennell, in her best black silk, sat in a queenly manner to watch, tapping her foot during the square dances, nodding her head during the waltzes, though she told Joanna she didn't think much of the way people danced so close together these days. Joanna had brought Jamie, who looked on for a while, too enchanted to move from the bench; his eyes blazed deeply blue, his cheeks scarlet. All at once he was sleepy, and settled down with his head on Ellen's sweater, and Joanna's coat tucked around him. For the rest of the evening he slept in some hinterland far from the music, the sound of dancing feet and of laughter.

Thea and Franny were there, of course. Joanna nodded to Thea whenever they met during a square dance; sensing the reluctance with which Thea's hand came to meet hers, during Ladies' Chain, she made her own grip warm and firm, and smiled deliberately into Thea's eyes. Thea was nothing. Nothing at all.

Owen was happy enough. He spent the evening dancing with one of the summer people from Brigport, a slim little woman with a pert way of tilting her head to look up at him. Her smile was vivid; Owen's was brilliant, and it was doing its usual devastating work. Joanna, dancing with Dennis for a few minutes during a Liberty Waltz, nodded her head toward her brother.

“Do you see what I see?”

“Who's working on whom? That's what I want to know,” said Dennis gravely.

“I've seen this before. She thinks she's taking him over, but she isn't. Owen's never impressed by that type, but he can't help impressing her, any more than he can help breathing.”

It was easier than she'd thought it would be, to dance with Dennis. Of course the atmosphere helped, the music, and general good temper all around. Thea was watching, but Thea was nothing. As long as she could keep telling herself that, Thea would continue to be nothing.

Dennis waltzed with unspectacular ease, holding her neither too closely nor too distantly. Their bodies moved well together, and it was not necessary to talk, he seemed content to dance without speaking. Once he said to her, “That clear yellow is very becoming to you. And I like the black-eyed susans. I think all women should wear flowers in their hair.”

“Black-eyed susans are plain little things. I only put them in for fun.”

“Better than gardenias,” he said. “Or camellias.” His voice was very low, and she glanced sidewise at his face, but it was impassive in the momentary radiance of a hanging lamp. Then they turned, and shadow fell across his face, and she didn't look back at it.

“You look a lot different from the lobster-buyer,” she said lightly. “Gray flannels—and I like those jackets in the dull plaids. I want Nils to have one.” She concentrated on Nils in gray flannels and a muted plaid coat, and the image was dear and safe.

Bit by bit the dancers' energies ebbed away, the men began to remember that they'd have to haul tomorrow, the youngsters were growing heavy-eyed—Ellen was smothering huge yawns and trying not to look half-asleep whenever her mother glanced at her. The Brigport crowd began to collect up for the trip home in the moonlight. Franny Seavey, who'd been trying for half the evening to escape, won out at last and departed with Thea. The Fennells took Gram home. Sigurd reached the end of his repertoire and his pint simultaneously, and Leonie took the accordion under one arm, held on to Sigurd with the other, and escorted him out.

“If I don't,” she explained succinctly to all within hearing, “he'll flop where he is and I'll never get him up.”

Joanna, preparing to take her children home, looked around for Owen to carry Jamie. “He went out when the Brigport gang did,” said Ellen. “He was walking with that school teacher from Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, naturally,” said Joanna. “I forgot about her. Well, I guess we can manage Jamie—”

Young Charles, still carrying his importance like a shining blade, called to her from the other end of the hall. “If you can wait till I get the lamps blowed out, Aunt Jo, and the place shut up, I'll carry him!”

“Never mind,” said Dennis pleasantly. He came in from the porch, putting his pipe away. “I'll take him.” He walked down the hall toward Joanna and she found herself standing there dumbly, watching him, while Ellen dropped on the bench and Jamie slept on. Dennis came nearer, his face gravely pleasant; and behind him Young Charles moved about his duties like a slim phantom figure at the back of some dimly lit stage. After the noise of the evening, the shadowy silence held some expectant quality, the stillness beat at Joanna's eardrums . . . or was it her own pulses that beat so hard, because she was tired and oddly nervous.

Then Dennis was lifting Jamie, and Joanna and Ellen went out behind him. They came into a world all sharp black shadows and blue-white radiance and a strange effortless warmth that was so rare on the Island that you wanted to take it into your hands; or to walk in it for hours and wonder if the moon were not casting its own silvery warmth.

When Joanna came downstairs, after putting Jamie into his crib and blowing out Ellen's lamp for her, Dennis was still waiting in the dining room. She hadn't bothered to light the Aladdin, and the moonlight fell in knife-sharp, lop-sided angles on the floor; Dennis was a silhouette by the bright windows.

“Come out for a walk,” he said simply. He turned his head as he spoke, and she saw his profile against the moonlight. His voice reached across the room to where she stood in the dark, at the foot of the stairs. It was low, it didn't hurry, it wasn't urgent. There was no harm in this, she thought.

“All right,” she answered as simply.

They went out the back way. The moment that Joanna had said
All right
, Thea had slipped maliciously into her mind. And then she knew Thea was more than nothing, after all. She hated her, because even the innocent gesture of walking with a friend must be tinged with slyness, and so seem less innocent.

But once they were out and walking across the field, and the rare and wonderful warmth enveloped them gently, she stopped thinking of Thea. The Island was always another world by night, and by moonlight it became a world that she could imagine sometimes in dreams, or when she listened to certain music. She didn't want to speak, to bring any ordinary note into this atmosphere, and Dennis was quiet too, as if he also moved in a hushed and precious unreality.

They went through the Fennells' gate—the white house stood sleeping against the high black ramparts of the woods—and down into Barque Cove. There lay the sea, immense, untroubled as the windless air, steel-blue and silver. In the deeply walled cove the water made a rhythmic whispering and shushing as it drew in and drew out. Joanna didn't stop here; she went up the grassy slope at one side, following the narrow, twisted path that led to Sou-west Point, and when she reached the top of the slope she stopped. From the woods behind them some small bird moved in its nest and called sleepily, and then was still. Not even a breath stirred the grass, only Joanna's and Dennis' feet released some aromatic scent from it that held a faint essence of sunshine and spray and wind.

“Let's sit down here for a few minutes,” Dennis said. “I want to take this all in.”

“We don't get a night like this once in ten years.” Joanna sat down cross-legged, and the ground was still warm with its remembered sunlight. Dennis, beside her, reached for his pipe and then he stopped and smiled.

“No, I won't smoke. I want to smell the night. I wish I had a nose like Dick's, so I could pick out every little scent that's on the air right now.”

Joanna felt relaxed and calm. She was glad she had come out with him, after all. “Well, there's the grass,” she said. “There are several kinds. And there's spruce. And clover. Rockweed from the cove down there, and the salt water itself.”

“I smell something else.” He looked around him. “It's quite strong, and very sweet.” He got up and walked toward the woods a few paces. “It's stronger this way—don't you smell it?”

Joanna got up and followed him, and the instant she moved she smelled it too. The exotic sweetness of blackberry blossoms, lying heavily on the stillness.

“I've found it!” he called back to her. “Come here!” She stood motionless where she was. She could see him very clearly in the pale white light . She could even see his puzzled smile. “Coming? Oh, I suppose it's an old story to you, you've known this all your life.”

His voice was easy but as distinct as the shadow of the scrub spruce near which she stood. She answered him quietly.

“No, it never gets to be an old story. It always surprises me.” She walked toward him then, and the blackberry vines trailed through the grass, their blossoms small and glimmering and white. She dropped down beside them; Dennis went down on one knee and broke off a little spray.

“Blackberries,” he said. “Wild ones. Running over this hillside, and spilling out such perfume. . . . It's a perfume that doesn't belong to New England, does it?”

“Oh, I don't know.” She kept looking down at the vines, not at Dennis who knelt so close to her. “Look at lilacs.”

“But they're tamed, they live safely in dooryards. This is something wild and unexpected.” When he twisted the spray in his fingers, its scent moved out from it, and with every breath Joanna felt a wave rise higher and higher in her; it was like a tidal wave, it threatened to sweep over her and drown her in a flood and foam of old memories, old emotions. She would not recognize them for what they were, she fought them back. Dennis, still kneeling, looked out over the sea that rippled gently and endlessly in a dull-silver pattern; the moon shone on his face and took away all color, but darkened to clear-etched black lines the manner of its carving; the eye-hollows, the brow, the curve of the nostrils and the lips and the indented lines at the corners of his mouth.
But that isn't the way he supposed to look
, she thought with a quick, inward shock of surprise.
He should be laughing, and reach forward to put the flowers in my hair
—

For a moment her world rocked back and forth, she was actually confused. Panic rose; she had never known anything like this before, she felt as if she were swinging between two lives, one so long ago that it was like a dream instead of a reality. . . .
Reality
. Reality was a good safe word, she reached out to it and hung on to it, and it was a mooring.

That was fifteen years ago
, she said distinctly to herself.
And it was just such a night, warm and with a flood tide, and no wind, and all the rest of the Island was asleep . . . and we found the blackberry blossoms like this
.

It was Alec who had put the blackberry blooms in her hair, and kissed her afterward, his hands cupping her face, and her mouth going soft and ardent under his. Alec had been dead for thirteen years now, and she was behaving like an idiot.

The wave engulfed her, but it was a wave of heat and shame. She stood up swiftly, and her voice came with a coldness she didn't intend.

“I'll have to be getting back. You needn't come with me if you're not ready.”

But he was already on his feet, the white spray still between his fingers. “Of course I'll go back with you. I keep forgetting that you aren't a free agent—I've had no right to keep you out like this.”

He wasn't smiling, and she said quickly, “But I wanted to be out. A night like this is too rare to waste. It's just that—”

“It's just that—it's now time to go home,” he answered. But neither of them started down the narrow path. They stood looking at each other, and now his face was in the shadow, and hers in the moonlight, looking up. She knew that her heart was beating in slow heavy rhythm, she had a sense that something should be said—or shouldn't be said. Then she turned sharply and went down the steep trail to Barque Cove. He came behind her.

They spoke infrequently, but casually, on the way home, and when he left her at the back door he said “Good night,” in his usual pleasant way.

“Good night,” she answered, her voice brightly friendly. But when she came into the silent, unlit house, she stood for a long moment in the sun parlor, without moving. Dick padded downstairs and came out to meet her. She scratched his ears automatically, while she listened to the thudding in her veins.

Then, slowly, she went about the motions of getting ready for bed. Owen hadn't come in yet, Young Charles was sound asleep, looking very young and astoundingly innocent. For him, the Thea business had rolled past, he had probably half-forgotten it already. Ellen seemed to be dreaming happily, Jamie slept in his own profound fashion. Dick went in under the crib, and Joanna lay down in the big bed.

This was one of those nights when the bed seemed very big, and very empty indeed. Her mind was a chaotic jumble of square-dance tunes, of the sound of dancing feet and laughter, of the sudden, vibrant silence on the hillside, the water under the moon, the way the blackberry vines had looked in the grass, the way Dennis had knelt to break off a blossom.

Her whole body ached and throbbed, burned and cooled and then burned again. She tried to laugh.
It was all that dancing
, she thought.
Hypering around as if I wasn't any older than Ellen . . . . Nils will laugh when I tell him how I capered at the dance
.

All at once the ache increased. It was not from dancing, after all, it was for Nils, for a chance to lay her long body beside his, to feel his arm under her head, and his other arm across her so that she was encircled by him. Together thus, they made a sure, magic little universe of their own. But without each other the universe was in bits. She wondered if he had time to feel this sense of incompleteness, if it haunted all his days and then came to torment him in all its intensity when he was off his guard.

She moved her long legs restlessly between the sheets, she folded her arms behind her head and stared through the darkness. Then as her futile yearning groped inevitably toward its peak, her eyes filled with unexpected and incomprehensible tears. She could not fight them. Lying there in the soft night, she wept silently until she fell asleep.