Strawberries in the Sea (14 page)

While she was working in his room, he went past the window and across into the Percy yard, and came back with the aluminum extension ladder. He went to work on the roof and she finished the windows. So the first day moved quietly toward night, and she could not remember when she had last been so happy on land. She hoped Edwin was as happy up there on the sunny roof. She could not understand this euphoria when she knew she was really miserable, but suspected it was self-hypnosis, willing herself back into the days before she began worrying about boys liking her.

Queer to think that somewhere Con had been a cocky little redheaded kid, everybody's pet (to hear him tell it) and never dreaming that she existed. Well, they'd met, and they'd parted, and he was fine and she was wretched. So was it
meant
or not? And if it was meant— what for? She'd have liked to discuss the theory with Edwin, but she had never willingly discussed Con with anyone, and she never would. Yet it angered her for people to avoid mentioning him to her, as if he were some unnameable disease that had almost killed her; or, as she suspected with Edwin, he was simply an element that had come and gone and was of no account whatever.

Yet because of Edwin's presence, signified by the sound of his hammer from the roof and an occasional glimpse of his neat narrow head against the sky, she was able to think objectively about Con and his influence.

Con acted and I reacted, she thought. But when I came out here, I acted. Then he reacted. It was funny, in a grim way; she supposed the battle could go on forever if she'd let it, and sometimes she wanted to; while she still meant something to him he could not forget her, she was a stone bruise on his heel. Cutting the last tie, even one so vexatious, had the finality of death.

After supper Edwin wanted more sketches of her with her guitar. He had a painting in mind, and she jeered at the idea of using up so much paint on her. “It won't be a portrait of you,” he told her coldly. “You're just part of the design.”

“Be sure you make it good and abstract. Give the guitar hands and me strings. The guitar can play
me
. How's that?”

Austerely he ignored it. “I may use spruces for the background instead of the kitchen at Seal Point.”

“Be sure to get the toilet in. The door looks absolutely elegant.”

He herded her outside again and pointed to the cellar bulkhead. She sat with her back against the house and he sat on one of the sawhorses he'd made that afternoon. The western sky was saffron barred with violet behind tar-black spruces. Unseen from the yard a ball game went on in the well-field, but heard: shouts, applause, praise, insult, and dogs barking. Also unseen but heard, the seiners left the harbor on the nightly search.

“ ‘Three fishers went sailing out into the west,' ” Rosa sang to herself, “ ‘Out into the west as the sun went down—' ” She stopped; as a child the song had horrified her, as if it had been from the home harbor that the boat went out, and the bodies washed up on her own beach. She slid into
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
, with so much gusto that Edwin's gaze froze her into sobriety again. She was supposed to be remote.

She shut her eyes and visualized the school songbook they'd used in the eighth grade, and selected
The Meeting of the Waters
as proper for the mood. Ralph came around the corner of the house and sat down on the back steps. When she finished, he applauded softly. “My God, I don't know if it's that tune or the way you sing it, but I'm about ready to go down and call my wife and tell her to get ready to come home. . . . Hey, blat some more, as the old feller used to say.”

“What old feller?”

“I dunno, I just made him up.” Edwin went on sketching without looking up. “One thing about him,” Ralph said, “you can't disturb him unless you hit him. . . . Unless he's got ESP about all these long legs coming.” He gazed with candid appreciation at the approaching girls. “Times like these when I wish I was eighteen and single.”

The girls came up from the darkening lane in single file, Linnie ahead as she always was, her pale hair catching the last brightness from the western sky.

“Hi, Rosa!” she called, then stopped dramatically short. “I'm
sorry!
I didn't know you had company!” She looked at Edwin who, glancing up at his model, briefly noticed the girls and returned to his work.

“Now isn't that strange, love,” Ralph said. “I could have sworn you all went by dragging your feet and staring your eyes out while Edwin was shaking hands with half the population down at the harbor this afternoon.”

Linnie said haughtily, “It just so happens we came up to ask Rosa something. Of course we could wait until Mr. Webster”—she nodded at the oblivious Edwin in a stately manner—“went away, but that might not be for a long time.”

“True, true,” agreed Ralph. “Have you thought up yet what you're going to ask?”

Holly and Betsey gave up the struggle to keep from giggling. Vic gazed glassily at a treetop. Linnie began to blush, and stood even straighter than usual, and said her words very distinctly, “It just so happens that this is a legitimate errand, Ralph Percy.”

“You mean it's no little come-by-chance?”

Betsey and Holly collapsed on the ground, Vic's mouth was trembling. Linnie put her twitching hands in her pockets and refused to blink. Edwin gave the sky a cursory glance. As the light was almost gone, he put away his sketchbook, and looked inscrutably at the rest, as if the previous conversation would have meant absolutely nothing to him even if he'd heard it. Linnie, your curiosity's about to bounce back at you off a high brick wall, Rosa thought.

“This is Edwin Webster, my cousin,” she said formally to the girls. “They were too young to know you in the old days,” she said to Edwin. He stood up, bowing slightly as Rosa pronounced each name. The girls were self-conscious, not knowing whether to speak or not, but Vic nodded back at him and said conversationally, “Do you read lips?”

“
Vic!
” Linnie was horrified.

“Why shouldn't I ask? I want to know. I've never known anybody who could do that.”

Edwin looked tolerant. Rosa said, “Yes, he reads lips, so nobody has to shout at him, and that wouldn't do any good anyway. You can always write things down, too.”

“He wrote me a message today,” said Ralph. “He says, ‘For God's sake don't split your gullet yelling at me.' ”

He laughed enormously, and the girls laughed too, and moved in closer. They were remembering their manners, trying not to single Edwin out with stares, but they kept giving him quick glances. The Bennett girls began talking vivaciously with Ralph, giggling loudly at frequent intervals. Rosa guessed that Vic was anxious to try conversation with Edwin, but she couldn't think of anything to say and she was too intelligent to speak to him as if to a small child or a simpleton. Linnie slumped on the bottom step, broodingly chewing a stalk of grass, her hair falling forward to hide her face. Even if Edwin's deafness hadn't been the disturbing and exciting element here, his whole atmosphere would have put them down. Sitting on the sawhorse again, holding the ankle propped across the other knee, he had what his mother called his “pawky look”: slightly sardonic, slightly amused, and altogether superior.

“What was it you wanted to ask me?” Rosa asked Linnie's sheaf of hair.

Linnie didn't move or speak, and Vic gave her a poke in the ribs. “Wake up, Rapunzel,” she said.

“What, is it time to let down my hair?” Linnie threw it back and looked around at Rosa with her usual smile, which tonight reminded Rosa of Mr. Sorensen's; she didn't believe Jamie could smile. “Will you be in our show this summer? We like to do something to raise money for the Seacoast Mission, and we have a supper and a show and a dance.”

“What would you want me to do, and when?” She didn't have to do it, but no harm in talking about it.

“Sing some songs, and it won't be till late July or August, when they have a lot of summer people on Brigport, and there are more yachts around.”

“All right,” said Rosa, feeling gracious and generous; it was the evening and its mood. Tomorrow she could wake up feeling rotten, as if today had been one long drunk.

“O.K.,” said Vic, “let's go.”

“We're going over and wash Ralph's dishes for him,” Holly said. “Come on, Bets. Night, Rosa.” They looked at Edwin, said “Good night” loudly, and went off across the back yard to Ralph's. He followed them, whistling
Garryowen
again.

Vic said very precisely to Edwin, “I'm glad to have met you.” Edwin's nod of acknowledgment had been fined down by the years to a regal gesture, and Linnie gazed at him as if the sawhorse were an impromtu throne for a ruler in exile.

The girls left, and Rosa went into the house and lit a lamp. Edwin followed her, took the empty water pail, and went out. She stood looking around the kitchen, yawning and relaxed. It had been a good day. She had hardly thought of Con since her four o'clock waking except in this detached way, of which she was immensely proud; she hadn't believed herself capable of it. Through watering eyes she saw with sleepy pleasure Edwin's jacket slung over a chair back, and his pipe in a scallop-shell ashtray on the table.

When he came back with water he was smiling to himself. “You ham,” she said. “You had those girls wondering if they ought to curtsy and kiss your hand.”

He brushed that off like a Don Juan bored with his own powers, and went into his room. When she finished brushing her teeth he was just returning. He put a cribbage board and an unopened bottle of Jim Beam on the table.

“I'm dead on my feet!” she protested. “I couldn't even see the cards!”

He held up one finger.

“All right, but no more than one. And I don't want a drink.” But he was already reaching into the cupboard for glasses, and didn't see her refusal. He poured out a small drink for her, a larger one for himself, and began to shuffle the cards. She stifled her yawns, but her eyes watered in streams, and she had to keep wiping them. Edwin seemed to be entertained by her discomfort.

When he sat down he had taken the sketchbook out of his hip pocket and put it on the table. Determined to come awake for at least the one game, Rosa reached for the book, but with his eyes brightly fixed on hers he slid the book out of her reach.

“What's that for?” she demanded, laughing. “What have you got in there besides me? Bare nekkid women?”

He smiled and began to deal. Like his silence and because of it, his smiles were always enigmatic, even when one knew they expressed simple, uncomplex human reactions. This time she wasn't sure of that, but she was too sleepy to try to solve a secret which she had no chance of ever finding out. She arranged her hand and tried to focus on it, ignoring her drink. His was already gone, and she hadn't even seen him swallow it.

He was not an habitual drinker, and she realized now that the sight of the bottle had already jarred her, even before he moved the sketchbook out of her reach.

All right, Sunny Jim, she thought, just for that I'll skunk you.

Five games later she hadn't skunked him. She was groggy. Edwin had taken her drink and poured two more for himself. There was a flush along his cheekbones deeper than the day's sunburn, and his skin looked unusually tight over his bones. The brightness of his eyes had become a glitter like that of fever; their color was that of the lampflame. He had been speeded up rather than drugged by the liquor, his gestures over-precise, and the poise of his head was exaggeratedly alert, as if he were listening hard for something. His triumph whenever he won seemed to be over something more than a card game.

Rosa's uneasiness became real discomfort. Finally, at the end of a game, she dropped her cards and stood up. “No more,” she said emphatically, with a sidewise slash of her hand. “I'm done. I'm going to bed.”

He tilted back in his chair and looked up at her with a kind of luminous hilarity, and she shook her head. “Stay up all night and play solitaire! And get drunk! I don't give a damn!” She went out to the toilet. The night was quiet except for the rote and the irregular clanging of the bell buoy beyond Sou'west Point. When she went in again, the kitchen seemed too warm, smelling too much of liquor. Edwin still sat at the table but turned away from it, hunched forward, elbows on knees and his hands hanging loosely clasped between. He gazed into space with the same blind preoccupation she had noticed this morning at the cove, only it was more intense now. The effect was of complete and desolate solitude, and it punched her in the stomach.

She went to him and put her hand on his shoulder. He didn't move, he felt like heated stone under her palm. She took the pad from his shirt pocket and wrote on it, “Why did you really come out here?”

She held it in front of his face so that he had to move his head back. He read it, then knocked it out of her hand. He stood up and threw the pack of cards with a flip of his wrist that scattered them across the kitchen; he threw the cribbage board next, and it hit and dented the wall between two windows. His hand came for the bottle next, but she grabbed that and the lamp.

He brushed past her, heading for the back door; he staggered slightly, enough to hit the doorframe with one shoulder and throw him a little off balance as he went out. Her heart was beating so hard she still felt sick to her stomach and she couldn't stop thinking of his face drawn tight in dreadful immobility, with only the tawny eyes alive.

Rage or something else? Awed, frightened, and anxious, she went out onto the doorstep and listened. Again she heard nothing but the rote and the bell. Well, he had run all over this island at night in the past, and he wasn't falling-down drunk, she assured herself. She went inside and picked up the cards and the cribbage board. The sketchbook wasn't around, he must have done something with it while she was out to the toilet.