The End of the Point (14 page)

“I lied,” she admitted. “I just . . . I’m thirty-six.” She could see now that his hands were shaking, and she had an overwhelming desire to still them with her own, but she did not.

“Oh? And with a husband in Scotland? And with a kid or two? For Christ’s sake, Bea, what else haven’t you told me?”

“That’s all,” she whispered.

“Why should I believe you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said, ‘Me too,’ ” he said.

“Sorry?”

“That morning. When I said the thing about the baby. Did you forget? You said, ‘Me too.’ ”

She was crying again now, as mosquitoes buzzed around them and the humid air pressed over them and, in the distance, fireflies blinked. He sat down on the stone wall a few feet away on the edge of the road, with a soldier’s manly posture, rigid, staring out.

“What else?” he asked.

Nothing. Nothing else.

“Are you really thirty-six?”

She nodded and went to sit beside him, and when she had trouble getting on the wall, he reached over and helped her up, his thick hands around her thick waist, and she thought this, this was what she wanted, to stop right here, on a stone wall like the walls at home, with a silent offering of help from a good man, the sort she might make a life with, if only . . . what? How many lives could you have in this world, how many times could you pack your bags and step away from the rooms you knew, from the people, or was it that she did not want a walk-up flat, to stand behind a counter—
Good morning, may I help you?
—in a strange city in the middle of a strange country (here or there, it would never be home), measuring out nails and screws for petty change?

“Would you think of moving there, to New Jersey?” she asked. “So I could stay on with her, maybe? With the family? Just for a bit, to get Janie used to the idea?”

He stared at her.

“It’s very nice there,” she went on. “They . . . they have a beautiful house, a mansion with a pool, in a lovely neighborhood called Grace Park. There’s a hardware store in town, maybe you could—”

“You want me to move to
Grace Park
? To be what? The stablehand? Or sweep floors at someone else’s store? I have my mother, Bea. A good business. We own the building. We have friends and family. I’m offering you a life.”

“I have a life.”

“So,” he said, “do I.”

ALREADY SHE COULD FEEL HIM
beginning to move on; he would pluck another shoe from a pile, meet another woman. He would be a jolly, kind father, a fine husband. If he was not shipped off, if he made it through the war. He would be a family man before long with someone else, if she said no. And if she said yes? She moved closer to him and placed her hand over his, and he allowed her to, and so they sat.
Do not die
, she wanted to command him, for if he did (or if she never heard but spent her whole life wondering), her heart would surely break. Better to say nothing, though. Just sit. After a time, he took his hand back and placed it in his own lap, and then, without looking at her, got up.

He turned to face her. “You’re no spring chicken, you know. You won’t get another chance.”

So he could also be cruel; she was glad to know it. On the base, a siren sounded, blaring, then stopped. Early on these sounds had frightened her; now they ran together with the wind and waves. She held out her arms to the night, then dropped them to her sides. For a moment she had the strangest thought—that if he were a child, she would surely leave Janie and go with him. She could see him as a boy, a bit wide in the hips, chubby in the face, with a child’s goodness and a child’s sense of wonder; she would clean him head to toe and keep him well and teach him things as U-boats rose and bombs dropped down. There was something about a boy, purer, straighter, less cunning than a girl. Something about a boy, but not a man.

By then his back was turned; he was walking away.

“Smitty,” she called. “I’ll write. Soon, I promise. I just . . . I need time to think—”

He turned around. “So you haven’t decided?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I . . . I’ve been making a shell box for you.” The words fell like stones. “It’s not quite done, but nearly. Shall I get it? I can run and get it now.”

He was a good fifteen feet from her. He did not move or speak. Later, when she looked back (as she would—daily at first, then less often and eventually only once or twice a year, for the rest of her life), she would wonder what might have happened if she’d gone to fetch the shell box. She’d wonder too, what might have happened if he’d said, No, forget about the shell box, and walked over and kissed her. She could see it all, Smitty hesitating, then backtracking, how she’d let herself drop into the kiss. Would it have changed the course of things? Or if he’d
insisted
she marry him, called upon his need, her duty, for she was no shirker. Or if he’d said, Yes, I’ll move, and you can have us both, even if he wasn’t sure he meant it, as a way to help her through? Or this: Pulled her into the long grass, the scrubby pines. Lifted her dress, dropped her drawers. Given her his seed. A child. Over the years, the image would slip between her other thoughts: Smitty forcing himself on her—no choice, an act, and with it a violence but also a pleasure, no less real for being forced.

In truth, he kept his distance, would not look at her.

“I’ll send it,” she said. “Battery B, Ashaunt Point. Right?”

He answered slowly, as if she were dim-witted. “Fort Rodman. New Bedford.”

“Oh. Why not here?”

“Here? Nothing but stones and rich people on vacation. You thought you saw some soldiers? Ha! Look again! Address a letter here, and you’ll get yourself turned in.”

“Fort Rodman,” she said. He was frightening her now, something jumpy, steely, in his tone. “Still Battery B?”

It might have been roll call, then, the way he spoke:
“Battery B Fort Rodman New Bedford Massachusetts Sergeant Raymond Smith.”

As if she did not know—as if she might forget—his Christian name.

THE NEXT DAYS WERE A
dream and a daydream—getting Janie up, putting her in the bath, washing her hair, tucking the girl inside her towel, setting out their breakfast—Annie had made scones again, and there was compote from the blackberries they’d picked, and poached eggs, though Bea had little appetite. Downstairs, they passed by Helen, who was still giving Bea the silent treatment. In a few rooms, paintings had been taken down. Couches and tables were draped with sheets. Everyone kept saying, too often, too brightly, that they’d be back next summer or the summer after that (seven years, it would be before they returned). After her bath, Janie surprised Bea by doing something she rarely did anymore, flinging her towel down and asking for baby oil, and so the child stood there, spine bent, blond hair darkened, straight with water, and Bea smoothed the oil on her legs and arms and up her back and shoulders and squeezed some into the child’s palm so she could do the rest herself.

Bea would not walk with Janie on the road, or sit on the front porch, or go anywhere at all where she might run into Smitty. Anyway, Janie knew they were not to go among the soldiers. They would have to stay near the house, or at the very most follow the path behind it to the beach. There was, besides, Janie’s packing to do.

“You’ll soon see your room at home,” she told the child as she began to sort and fold her clothes.

Janie flopped onto her bed. “Will there be soldiers?”

“I shouldn’t think so. Not like here.”

“Will it be just like before?”

Bea nodded.

“With our same rooms?”

“Of course. Why would we change around the rooms?”

Bea’s room in Grace Park was bigger, less damp, than her room on Ashaunt, the floor not slanted. Her coverlet there was dotted with sprigs of blue flowers. She had a card table, its dark green leather top outlined in gold, where her shellflower supplies could be laid out. The bathroom she shared with Agnes had a small white porcelain sink. Her room with the first family had been a bed-size closet, with a strung-up curtain for a door. When she’d first arrived at the Porters’ and seen that sink—the brass spigots marked
C
and
H
, hot water flowing clear and fast—she’d grown teary at the sight of it, then mocked herself for crying over a sink.

“Are you sad?” asked Janie now. “To be leaving?”

It was a surprising moment. Rarely did the child ask Bea about herself, not even Are you hungry, are you cold?

“A bit,” she admitted, and felt her eyes well up. She took a breath. “Well. Let’s start to pack your toys.”

“My collections.”

Bea sighed. Every year, it was the same battle. Janie saved horseshoe crabs and rocks, beach rose hips, butterflies and beetles, every manner of broken and chipped shell, bits of driftwood and sea glass, lobster claws, smelly, rattling strands of seaweed. This year had been worse than most, as Janie suddenly fancied herself—at eight!—too old for toys, and had been scavenging, foraging, pocketing all summer with a fervor that Bea found at once irritating and, in its intensity, a little strange.

“A few favorite games, and Rose and her things,” Bea said. “And your few best shells. We can’t be bringing half the beach.”

“
You
take shells home.”

Bare as bones, hers were, and not even enough to fill a canning jar. She sorted and sorted, threw away, bleached down. “Only what I need for my projects. I throw away nearly the whole lot and clean the ones I take.”

“I’ll clean mine. I promised Charlie.”

“Charlie? That you’d bring home your collections? Why?”

“To send him things. So he could see Ashaunt.”

“I’ll help you pick the best,” said Bea, knowing that this year, she would let her take it all.

THEN SORTING THROUGH TOYS AND
soaking and scrubbing Janie’s collections, and as time passed (an hour and then another and another; it felt like days), Bea began to feel more herself again, calm and returned but also full of her story—
he asked me to marry him last night
—but she said nothing to anyone. It was not a bad thing, anyway, to guard a memory or two inside you. She would revisit that night, when he asked her to marry him, for the rest of her life, though less and less frequently as she grew older, first serving as nurse to Helen’s children, then, for a time, to Janie’s, then nurse to nobody, just a bit of mending and dusting and helping Mrs. P. and bathing a grandchild here and there, and a lot of sitting around twiddling her thumbs, and finally (
But why?
Janie, in her mid-forties when they left, would ask her.
Why now, after so many years? I’m not passing judgment, Bea. I just don’t
—
I don’t understand
) moving back to Scotland with Agnes, where they purchased a fine house on a hill in Forfar and opened a crafts supply shop. Once a year Janie and her husband Paul would visit, sometimes with their children, or Helen’s daughter, Caroline, would come, or Janie’s daughters, and they’d go on outings—to Kirriemuir, where J. M. Barrie wrote
Peter Pan
, to Glamis Castle (and on the way, the gravestones of her grandparents, though Bea never pointed them out). Mrs. P. came twice, before she grew too old, and her funeral was one of two trips Bea made back to America, this time on her own, Agnes too frail by then to come. Once when Janie was visiting, Bea told her a little about that summer and Smitty, and Janie said yes, she knew the story, except her version was this: how Bea had gotten a marriage proposal from a soldier and asked for her, Janie’s, permission, and Janie had said no.

“Did I keep you from happiness? I’ve always worried, Bea; I’ve never dared ask.”

“Don’t be silly,” Bea told her. “You couldn’t have forbidden it. How could you have? I never told you a thing about it.”

“Are you sure? Dossy said you’d asked my permission. So did Helen. I’ve thought so for years. I’ve always felt—”

“Rascals, those two!”

“They were, weren’t they?” Janie smiled. “I don’t remember much about that summer—mostly just everyone waiting for letters, and how we didn’t go back after that for years. Your soldier friend was nice, though. I remember that. Friendly, wasn’t he?”

Bea nodded. “He liked to joke.”

“But you just weren’t in love with him, I suppose. Is that it?”

“No. No. I don’t know. I liked him very much. I was—”

How could she say it? In love with you more? Frightened of change? Of him dying? Of a life spent sorting nuts and bolts in a hardware store? There was no one answer; there were too many. And perhaps she’d made a mistake. People did—big ones and little ones, all along the way—but who was to say, and it was by now long ago, and not worth dwelling on. She’d been, she thought, largely lucky in her life. She could not complain.

“You were what?” asked Janie.

“I’d left a lot of things behind already,” she said. “I couldn’t see leaving you as well.”

“I did. I kept you from your life,” said Janie. “How awful.”

“Oh my, no,” said Bea. “You were such a good girl. I’ve always been so grateful to your mother for letting me have you. And look at how well you’ve turned out.”

If Janie’s face flickered then, Bea did not notice. Janie was silver-haired, elegant, in a smart linen suit that had not wrinkled from her travels; she looked the picture of Mrs. P. Janie’s husband Paul had walked to the chemist’s to pick up medicine and the newspaper. He loved to walk and would come back from his outings having made friends with half the town, which was not an easy thing in Forfar, where people kept to themselves. In the next room, Agnes lay in bed, half taken by a stroke. On her bedroom wall, as on Bea’s, hung photographs of the Porter children and grandchildren. Above the mantel of the gas stove in the living room hung a photo of the Big House and one of Grace Park. Above the blue sofa was a seascape by Dossy, and above that in a shellflower frame a faded picture of Bea’s mother, and a picture of Callum’s adopted son Ian with his wife Marcy and their children, and a small brown print of Agnes as a girl, with a solemn expression and a fringe. In Bea’s room were two photographs in matching silver frames, one of Helen’s daughter Caroline on her second birthday, the other of Janie at around the same age, both girls already with watchful, deep-set, slanting eyes. The house was homey; Bea thought so, and Janie remarked on it each time she came. From Agnes’s rose garden, you could see both the country and the town, twenty shades of green and gray.