Off Season (5 page)
“I don’t think everybody can,” I said once, slowly. “Maybe they could once, but now I think not so many people can. Maybe you forget. Or maybe some just never could do it. I can, I think, but I don’t really remember it after I have, just the way it felt. But you know, Jeebs could never do it.”
My father laughed heartily, and said he thought I had that right. He related the conversation at supper the next night and Jeebs, who was fed up to the gills with a sister who prattled constantly about flying, said waspishly, “I bet I could, too, if I wanted to. It’s just aerodynamics. But everybody knows that people can’t fly and never could, or we’d know about it. You’re crazy as a loon, Lilly.”
My mother laughed too, and gave my curls a little twist, and reached out and pushed Jeebs’s soft, heavy, dark hair off his glasses. Even then Jeebs looked like a scientist, a miniature one, his intense dark eyes behind the thick, round lenses focused almost permanently inside his head.
“My dear Dr. Jeebs,” she said, “you have many and singular talents, and will one day no doubt win a Nobel Prize in something no one has ever heard of, but I do not think you could ever fly. Lilly, on the other hand . . .” and her voice faded away, and her smile widened.
Love and wings bloomed inside me.
Children forget quickly and without regret, but somehow they rarely lose the forgotten thing. It sinks quietly deep inside them and drifts into the maw of childhood as neatly as a tender new bone into a forming skeleton, and there it stays: part of the fabric of Child. After a time I did not talk so much about flying; I did not, after all, ever see my ethereal visitants, and other and newer furniture of childhood was brighter and clearer. Occasionally I said, as casually as I might say anything unremarkable and of my world, “Back when people could fly . . .” but my family and the few friends who knew of my celestial predilection usually ignored me. And every now and then I would dream of flying. I dreamed more than once of swimming through a pink and blue mist, turning and diving and rising as in water rather than air but knowing in the dream that I was flying, so full of rapture and transcendence that I would wake with tears on my face at losing the dream. After those dreams it occurred to me that you could fly without wings if you chose, simply by swimming into the air, and I was much comforted by this. I had always been puzzled by where the wings were kept.
By that summer of 1962 flying was, to me, perhaps a once-a-year dream, or something brought sharply alive for a snip of a second by a curl of fragrance in the air, a taste, melting instantly. So when I whistled for Wilma on that first day and ran from the seawall over the rock promontory to the left of the cove and up it to where the rocks crested in a sort of red-granite crow’s nest, high above the beach and the house and the bay, it was not to look farther up, but down.
There it was, the familiar sweep; from the firs and rooftops of Retreat Colony to the far left, and the masts in Center Harbor and the boatyard beyond, and the sweep of water where Eggemoggin Reach became Jericho and then Blue Hill Bay, down the coast to the right, where the chimneys of the old cottages of which ours was one broke the forest, and the sea stretched, glittering in small dimpled cat’s-paws where little winds broke it, over and under the great green Deer Isle Bridge, and where Deer Isle lies, and beyond it all to the low, sweet body of Great Owls Head Island. It was a locally famous and much-recommended view; almost everyone’s visitors were driven to climb the rocks and gaze at it, especially when sunset stained everything silver and magenta and lavender and a furious, hungry pink. I had always regarded it as my own. I was the only one of our small crowd who bothered to come to the top of the headland; the others contented themselves with diving from its lower rocks into the bay. Mr. Carl Forshee, who owned the old cedar cottage that lay just behind the headland and whose property it was, feared for our safety (and lawsuits, my mother said), and drove us away whenever he caught us swimming from it. But in the end he could not stem the tide of small brown bodies silver with seawater arching off his rocks, so he simply put up a sign that said
ANYONE SWIMMING FROM THESE ROCKS WILL BE PROSECUTED
and left it at that. We swam. He did not prosecute.
My father might have come with me on this ritual first climb to the rooftop of our world; he was taking a summer’s sabbatical at Edgewater to pursue his work on the songs and ballads of John Donne, of which none were known to exist but which he was stubbornly certain did somewhere, and he was determined to unearth and preserve them.
“If you did, would we be rich?” I asked him once.
He looked at me in surprise.
“I have no idea, Lilly. But the world would be richer by far for the finding of them.”
Since that made little sense to me, I did not pursue it, and learned to leave him alone when he was deep in Donne. He was on this glowing, pulsing first day, so I climbed the staircase to the top of our summer world with only panting, scrabbling Wilma for company.
For some reason, I shut my eyes before I looked. Then I opened them, and the world of my summers wheeled around me. I drew in a breath; down below on earth, you smelled clean, still-cold, kelpy sea and warming rock and newly mown grass and smoke from the dying fires of the cold morning. Not much in the way of flowers bloomed this early in June, but there was a fresh acrid smell of new vegetation and the smoky musk of wild lupines, and somebody’s breakfast bacon always seemed to linger. But up there you smelled only wind and empty space and the deeper, darker body odors of the great Atlantic, off beyond the outer ledges and islands. A wild smell, the old one.
The day was so clear that everything—the horizon, the far curve of Great Owls Head, Deer Isle—was edged in blue. The sky was the tender, almost crooning blue of early summer; I knew that the great clarion cobalt that stained earth and water would not come until some pre-autumn day in late August. But it was still enough to steep everything in the absolute purity of blue. The dimples of the cat’s-paws spoke of winds to come; this time of year it usually started up a little after lunch, setting all the colony flags to snapping and driving our mothers indoors for sweaters. But now it was calm. The sun seemed stronger here. I shucked off my hated cardigan and kicked off my sandals and gripped the grainy pinnacle of granite with my long toes. Pure, bottomless, meaningless joy gripped me so hard that my head swam with it and I clenched my eyes shut, watching the whorls of light pinwheel behind them. It was not a new feeling; children have it fairly often, I think. But I do not remember that it came back to me after that day. Wilma leaned against me and thumped his tail and I opened my eyes again.
Down below, precisely in the center of the symmetrical cove that cradled our beach and land, my grandfather’s house sat like a jewel in a rajah’s turban. It was painted a strange pea green, with dark red trim and black shutters, and it had grown from a simple two-story New England colonial to a jumble of wings and ells and porches and terraces that looked crumpled and thrown down as from a giant’s hand. But somehow it was not awkward. It looked as if it had sprung, mushroom-like, from the sandy earth and the forest behind it after one rain, organic and right. It looked no age at all, but at the same time far older than I knew it was, fully as old as the oldest cottage in our little enclave or the larger one over at Retreat. Only our car and station wagon stood in the driveway now, but I knew that soon it would be thronged with the cars of visitors and the trucks of deliverymen and the wagons and bicycles of all of us. Already a kite and upset croquet set lay on the side lawn. Shoes littered the deck by the kitchen door. Screened doors slammed and the snap of sails filling with wind echoed off the water and the sound of the Palestrina to which my father always worked curled up with the dying smoke from our fireplace.
Edgewater. It had always been here. I had always been here.
“It’s a real Bar Harbor day,” I said to Wilma, who thumped his tail and went back to licking his balls luxuriously. Wilma was all male, unmistakably and irrevocably male. He was rawboned, lank, flop eared, often stinky, and always happy. He was my dog and would be no one else’s; I had found him when he was a small puppy, tottering around a garbage can in the kindergarten play yard, starved and crawling with fleas.
Even then he was happy; his small, generic tan-and-brown face lit into a wide white smile when he saw me, and he pranced over to me, weaving a little from weakness and rubbery puppy legs, and sat down on my shoe. The matter was settled then and there. I took him home wrapped in my sweater, crooning to him, and fed him a mush of carrots and onions and potatoes from last night’s pot roast, and was pouring milk into my Grandmother Constable’s delicate Haviland consommé cup when my mother arrived in the kitchen.
“No. Absolutely not,” she said, looking at the puppy, who gave her a milky grin and began gnawing at the fleas on his feet.
“You’ll have to take him back to wherever you found him. He’s probably carrying plague or something even worse.” And when I set up a howl, she said hastily, “I bet his mommy misses him. You don’t want to take him away from his mommy, do you?”
“He’s got no mommy,” I wailed. “Look at him! Does he look like he’s got a mommy?”
There was no rebuttal to this; the puppy was the most patently motherless creature anyone had ever seen.
“Well, we’ll have to take him somewhere,” my mother said. “You better get used to that.”
“Will not!” I cried. “Will not! Will not willnot willnot willlnot willnot . . .”
It had risen to a dirge of anger and tragedy that was positively Aristotelian in tenor and volume when my father came into the kitchen. He looked at me, feet planted on the kitchen floor, eyes screwed shut, mouth open, cheeks stained with rage; looked at the tatty puppy already asleep on my shoulder, and said, “What a fine puppy. I’ll bet it’ll be a grand grown-up, a real watchdog. A female, is she? Wilma, you’ve named her?”
It was soon apparent that Wilma was a boy dog, but by then it was too late; Wilma he became and Wilma he stayed. He turned into a huge, flat-pawed, tongue-lolling, tail-whipping black-and-tan dog with what seemed to be more than a little wolf in him. His teeth were white and saber-sharp, his growl and bark were formidable, his yellow eyes under his thick tan eyebrows could look murder at you. But Wilma never murdered, seldom if ever barked, and growled only once, to my knowledge, when I was about to reach down and pick up a baby porcupine. Wilma was a lover, not a fighter, and even if he would win no Best in Shows, he was a great favorite with my small crowd at Edgewater. He would follow us anywhere, grinning and larruping, would accept huge hugs and from any one of us, no matter how rib-crushing, and was seldom more than a yard or two from my side. He even slept with me in my narrow iron cot at night, not flinching when I rolled over on him or shoved him out of my space. Cleaned up and well fed, he was really quite a presentable dog, though never handsome, and only seldom did he fart in company. But when he did he could clear a room in five seconds. I remember a Thanksgiving when I was about nine, when there must have been twenty people clustered in front of the fire, chatting genteelly and sipping sherry and waiting for dinner. My prepossessing Constable grandparents were among them. All of a sudden, the crowd surged swiftly away from the fire en masse, like some many-celled sea organism scuttling along the sandy bottom. I was watching from the kitchen, having begged a turkey drumstick from a harried Lucille, sweating in her white apron and cap. I knew what had happened. When the crowd dispersed, there was Wilma, lying contentedly on the hearth rug, nodding with warmth and the comfort of the post-fart condition.
Wilma seldom joined us for state occasions after that.
A Bar Harbor day was a day so clear that there were sharp blue lines around everything: horizon, hills, mountains, trees, faraway islands. On such days the ladies of the colony would announce a trip to Bar Harbor, about an hour’s drive away, to drift along the main street and try to sift some gold from the dross of tourist displays in windows: moose heads on towels, pillows stuffed with pine and balsam, whale ashtrays, stumps carved into stodgy black bears. No one from Carter’s Cove ever bought anything in the town, but the ritual had to be observed. Everyone then went to Testa’s for Bloody Marys and lobster salad. Afterward there might be a visit to the glorious Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor. I remember that the gardens were still open to the public then. And then the obligatory drive around the outer loop road to watch the sea battering furiously at Mount Desert, with a stop at Thunder Hole to see if the incoming tide would boom and thunder under the hollow rocks when it rushed in and send up a huge spray of white, salty foam. Then a stop at Jordan Pond, at the pond house, for tea and popovers that tasted to me like encrusted air. And then home, into the sunset that would soon bloom over our cove and would, on such a day, be breath stopping, a conflagration of purple, orange, pink, vermillion, all shot with gold.
“It’s the prettiest one ever,” someone would say, and everyone else would mutter assent, and then, in a day or so, one even more spectacular would bloom in the west and the chorus would begin again. The sunsets of Carter’s Cove were the exclamation points to our days, the gifts given us whether deserved or not. Few of us did not walk out to see the sunsets. They were our earthly treasure.
After such a day, we usually had two or three days of wind and rain and fog. The natives around us called those perfect days weather breeders, and they were seldom wrong. I was glad for the storms. I could stay huddled in a moldy blanket in some upstairs nook or on the living room couch in front of the fire with Wilma, reading, reading. And best of all, there would be no chance at all of going to Bar Harbor. I hated Bar Harbor. I hated all of Mount Desert. I did not care that it was considered one of the world’s great scenic attractions. There the sea did not breathe with me, but roared and bellowed and hissed and threatened, and I would come home with my entire body aching from muscles stiffened against the Mount Desert sea.
