Strawberries in the Sea (22 page)

Vic was not purposely rude, she could not bring herself to it. Her smile was a weak, sickly flutter, worse than a scowl would have been. “We've been busy,” she murmured. She called back, “I'm going right home, Lin. I'm so thirsty.”

“All right.” Linnie came up one-handed, carrying a plastic bucket with cleaned flounder and fishlines in it. She gave Rosa a glassy-bright stare, and brushed past her to attend to the haul-off lines. While she was pulling the skiff out Rosa said, “Look here, is this all because I rode over with your brother that night?” Linnie's chin went visibly out and up, but she didn't look around. “Come on, Linnie, be grown-up and tell me what's biting you two.”

“All
right!
” Linnie said passionately. She made a couple of half-hitches around the spiling, yanking hard on the line. Her eyes were brilliant with tears. “You made Edwin go because Jamie told you to. And then you got Jamie when you
knew
how Vic felt about him! You got her to confide in you and everything. And all the time you—I'll bet you laughed about her with him, didn't you?”

“My God,” said Rosa quietly. “How wrong can you
be?
I never made Edwin go. He's a grown man—I couldn't make him do anything, and I wouldn't dare try. I was as surprised as anybody. And certainly your brother couldn't ever tell
me
what to do. And I haven't
got
him, whatever that means.”

“I don't believe you.” Linnie's mouth was trembling.

“Are you calling me a liar?” Rosa asked quietly.

“No—” Linnie stumbled and backtracked. “Only Jamie was making such a fuss about Edwin, and then all at once you and he are real friends—”

“Because he hauled me out of the breakers when my engine stopped one day, that's why. And Vic's name has never been mentioned between us except in normal conversation. I don't know how
you
operate, Linnie, but I don't pass on confidences to somebody else. Now you tell Vic I'm sorry about the night of the Fourth. When Jamie asked me if I wanted to ride over to pick you up, I didn't know I was committing any great sin.”

“You and Jamie had a date. That's why he didn't stay to the dance.”

“And Vic was counting on it, I know. I'm sorry he didn't stay. But we had no date.”

“Well, it doesn't make any difference,” Linnie said unsteadily. “You're his age and all, and you're
here
.”

“In other words, if I weren't here Vic would have a chance.”

“Yes,” Linnie said defiantly. “There's a lot more of summer. But he's always over in your fishhouse talking, or going up to your house, and he took you out to set his mackerel net, not us. What about Ralph and Marjorie asking you and Jamie to supper the other night, when you and Ralph played jigs and reels all evening, and then you and Jamie took a walk out on the west side?”

“Do you have your own private detectives?” Rosa asked.

“The Percy kids told me. I didn't ask them, I'm no sneak. Anyway, Vic feels just awful and she wants to go away. Our whole summer's ruined.”
All because of you
was on her lips, though she didn't say it aloud.

“Linnie, I'm sorry,” Rosa said. “Believe me. But I haven't done anything on purpose to hurt Vic. Jamie just talks to me like—like one fisherman to another.” It wasn't true, but it might help. She even laughed. “We discuss herring a lot. You don't think there's any hanky-panky going on, do you? With
me?
”

“What's the matter with you?” Linnie asked grudgingly. “I mean, you're thinner now, and you're good-looking—”

“And I'm also a married woman, which means plenty to me even if I'm not living with my husband. Well, tell Vic I enjoyed knowing her. When's she going?”

“Friday, and I am, too. We're going to visit her aunt in Connecticut. She has horses, and it's on the Sound too, lots of yachting and stuff.” She glared past Rosa at the blazing harbor. “It ought to be fun.” Her tone said nothing could be less fun.

“What about the show?”

“Who cares about that now?” Linnie kept staring at the harbor, apparently trying to will tears back. Having been in the same box herself at times, Rosa walked away up the wharf without saying anything more. At another time in her life it would have been both comic and enjoyable to be considered a dangerously powerful and attractive woman by a couple of lissome teen-agers. Maybe it was comic anyway, but she couldn't stand off and see it that way. It was all bound up with Con somehow, causing her alternate twinges of pain and anger; she could feel
with
Vic and in the next instant or even at the same time resent the fact that a few years from now the girls could look back reminiscently on this summer, laughing and shaking their heads, groaning at their choices. Their lives would go on flowering in spite of this year, but she had experienced her own shattering finish as a woman.

She was out hauling on Friday when the boat came and went. She was relieved; she'd been having to brush the girls off her mind like black flies off her arms.

She had a long letter from Leona Pierce, full of everything that had happened in Seal Point since Rosa left it. At the end she mentioned Con without writing his name. “Nobody sees much of
him
around town. He's still boarding with the Rowlands, but he's hardly ever there. I don't know who he thinks he's fooling . . .
I
think she's sickly. Of course a third of Adam Crowell's estate is quite a lot, maybe it'll be worth getting stuck with an ailing wife. I only hope the baby's healthy. Be a shame if the poor little thing's got allergies or something worse.”

Leona meant only to comfort her, but she was surprised at the personal anguish she felt at the thought of the child being defective in some way. She'd seen it for too long as a second Con, springy and indestructible. She couldn't take any satisfaction from the prospect of Con's being burdened with a languid, anemic wife; not if the baby was going to suffer too.

This was when she decided to start repainting the inside of the house. She had finished the outside and until now she had been in no hurry to start on the inside. But suddenly she couldn't endure it, and began scraping the last old paint off the kitchen cupboards she lay awake thinking of colors, and wrote to Edwin describing the exact shades she wanted, “Something paler than a robin's egg, not too pale, but not too bright either. . . . Yellow more creamy than yoke-yellow but not ivory. . . . ” She borrowed the Percys' mail order catalogues to study floor coverings and curtain materials with a febrile attention she'd never before bestowed on household furnishings.

Who knows, she thought, this may turn me into one of those wonderful housekeepers who always keep their stoves wiped off and the teakettle polished. I might even sink to scalloped shelf paper and embroidered bureau scarves.

When she wrote something of the sort to Edwin he wrote back, “Stop dramatizing yourself. It's just the normal nesting instinct.” She couldn't think of any answer which he couldn't demolish with a better one. He went on to write in detail about the work on the house, with illustrations in the margins. He did not mention the garden or the woman who was planting it.

In turn she never mentioned Jamie. He'd walked her all over the island on the evenings when he wasn't seining, often dropping in at one house or another until she became fairly casual about that. If they hadn't stopped in somewhere else, sometimes she gave him a cup of coffee and cookies in her own kitchen, but she would never sing for him when they were alone. It was as if it would bring him too close; she had seen the way his eyes changed when she sang at the Percys'.

On the next dark of the moon she saw less of him. Chasing herring at night and hauling traps by day left little time for courting. Some purse-seiners were in the area, but none came close to Bennetts'. When she called across the wharf to Jamie one afternoon that the war seemed to be over, he said curtly, “
Centurion
's being overhauled. The engine went all to hell. They'll be back.”

“They can't be in every place at once. Didn't you ever get herring in the harbor when they were at Bull Cove?”

He aimed a finger at her like a gun. “Don't let me hear that from
you
. The point is, we don't want any purse-seiners around here
anywhere
. The point also is we might sometimes want to stop off at Bull Cove and the harbor, both the same night—we've got the twine for it— and we've got a right to. Hell, we've got the right to shut off the whole damn island. Moral right if not legal. The others don't come now, just that McGraw bunch and Purvis right behind them, sailing high, wide and handsome down through the lobster gear and cutting off buoys left and right. It's a duel now. And for me there's no such thing as compromise. That means surrender in my book. They'd win, don't you see?” He was at once impatient and disappointed with her.

“But I do see.” She understood compromise, all right; someone was always the defeated. She might have saved her dignity but she'd still lost Con. Jamie could tell by her expression that she'd given in, though not why, and he laughed jubilantly. Heads turned toward them from the other wharves, in amused disbelief: “Jamie's caught, by God,” someone said loudly.

“I knew I could count on you,” Jamie said to Rosa. “
You
know it's personal, don't you? Between them and me?” He leaned his folded arms on a stack of traps and his chin on his wrists and his eyes proved to take in all of the island that he could see, harbor and land. No one else but Rosa knew what he was saying; let them think he was a man be-mused by love; and he was, but not the way they thought. “Jamie Bennett came over here from Brigport in 1827. He built a log cabin in the woods at Schooner Head and lived in it till he finished the first part of the Homestead. He paid a hundred dollars for the island, but it was everything he'd saved and could borrow, and it was as big as maybe fifty thousand now . . . at least to
him
, earned handlining from a wherry year in, year out, come day, go day, God send Sunday. There's a direct line from him to me, and I'm not about to let
Centurion
catch herring anywhere around this island. What's in our waters belongs to
us
.” He grinned suddenly. “Thought I was going to say
me
, didn't you? Well, I'm not that much of an egomaniac, though there's some who could give you a good argument on that. A few right in my own family.”

“Well, cheer up,” said Rosa, “My relatives don't think much of my actions, either.”

Still leaning on the traps, he was smiling and mellowed. “I'd like to be lying under a tree with you in the woods on the west side,” he said. “Where we could see the water so blue between the trunks, but we'd be in the shade, and the tops would be just moving in the little breeze. That would be the only sound. Except maybe for a little wash on the shore.”

She said, “Did you ever take time to lie under a tree?”

“Never could see any point to it . . . alone. If I came up to your house some hot afternoon, would you go with me?” He made it sound like a dare or a joke, but he didn't take his eyes from her face, and she felt a prickle of sweat on her forehead under her hair, and on her back. It was the kind of encounter she'd avoided so far by refusing to sing; there was something particularly disturbing about having it happen out in this sunny open, with his father working in the fishhouse and a couple of his uncles only two wharves over. She looked away from him, oddly flustered for one who was past even indifference. But what did her answer matter to
her?
If it put him off, or falsely encouraged him, that was his risk, wasn't it. Not hers.

She said finally, “I'd even supply the cold beer.”

“The two ding-dongs we had around here would start quoting something about a book of verse and a jug of wine. A guitar and beer sounds better to me.”

At that moment Ralph Percy came out on his wharf with his two sons in tow like a dory and skiff behind a beamy, rolling seiner. “Hey,” he called over, “when can I make a deal for a hogshead of herring?”

“You'd be safe enough,” Jamie said to Rosa. “If I sat still for five minutes I'd fall asleep.” He left his wharf to go around the Webster fishhouse and out to Ralph's.

The show petered out with the death of organizational fervor on the part of Betsey and Holly; a yacht carrying six boys and two counselors from a sailing camp down east put in and was fogbound for ten days. The younger children consoled themselves by playing “show” daily in one dooryard or another, with the resident mother supplying drinks and cookies.

Rosa sang for herself nowadays, not often, and no longer on the kitchen floor with her back in a corner, but upstairs in a little room facing out over the woods so that no one on the village side might hear her.

S
he had not consciously forgotten the divorce, but as long as no one mentioned it—and no one did, even in letters, as if they were avoiding the name of cancer or death—it seemed to have no immediacy. It passed through her mind occasionally like a bird flying past her face, but with less substance than a bird had. She had exchanged one world for another, and the exchange could only be valid as long as she refused to recognize the existence of the other.

On a foggy, blowy Monday morning she went early and eagerly for her mail, expecting an order from Montgomery Ward; new curtains and a large braided cotton rug for the living room floor. Bit by bit the house was becoming a home, rather than a shelter for a fugitive squatter who simply rolled up each night in a sleeping bag.

“Do you like to walk in the fog?” Joanna Sorensen asked her in the store. “Come down to the Eastern End with me this afternoon.”

Rosa agreed; after all, Joanna had sent her by Jamie some odd pieces of furniture from the Sorensen attic; a couple of comfortable old rocking chairs which needed only fresh paint, and a small sturdy table that would hold books and a lamp.