The End of the Point (2 page)

Outside, in front of the house, then, a tremendous rumble, a dreadful, rolling, grinding noise, and the children’s laughter stopped. Bea looked out the window at two lorries going by, soldiers in the back and on the sideboards. For a moment, she felt a great surge—of fear or patriotism, excitement or remorse. Her brother, Callum, his right leg shorter than his left, was an air raid warden in Glasgow. Two of her cousins were in the war. Still, until this moment, it had all seemed, had all been, quite far away.

“What on earth—” said Mr. Porter, but by the time Bea got his wheelchair around, the lorries—trucks—were gone.

“IF IT WASN’T SAFE, WE
wouldn’t have come,” but it wasn’t safe, not safe enough, or else why would most of the other families have left their houses empty, Ashaunt a quarter as full as it usually was, except for the end, which was overstuffed with men, machinery and guns? People disliked the noise, claimed Mrs. P., but the Porters came—Bea was quite sure of it—not because they were sure that it was safe, but because to be here was as close as they could get to Charlie, who was off at Army Air Corps training school in Texas; as soon as he earned his wings, he’d be shipped off. He had grown up in New Jersey except for school and summers, but if you asked him where he was from, he’d say Ashaunt.
Charlie’s Beetle Cat is still at the boatyard and needs to be put in; Don’t carry off the pieces—that’s Charlie’s favorite puzzle
, and his room was kept ready and empty, his fishing poles in a corner, his Yale pennant and a photo of his girl, Suky, on the wall. He was their firstborn and only boy, handsome, charming, fast and funny, and he loved this place as nowhere else. Bea was not fond of him, especially—he brought the devil out in the girls and did not pay her much mind except to tease—but even she was startled when she came upon his empty sand shoes in a closet; even she saw, in the faces of the youngest soldiers on the Point, Charlie’s face.

Every day, the moment the postman came, Mrs. Porter was at the box. Often, a letter arrived, and once a week or so, a phone call. When Mrs. P. got a letter, she took it off to read it before sharing it with her husband and daughters. One day, she passed Bea and Janie on the stairs—they coming down, she going up. Her hands were empty; the postman had just come and gone. She met Bea’s eyes. “Be grateful you don’t have any,” she murmured. It was a terrible moment, one Bea would never quite forgive her for, though as the years passed, they became in their way dear friends.

Suffer your tongue, Bea wanted to tell her. It was something her grandmother used to say. But she said nothing, Janie said nothing. They were alike that way. It was nearing lunchtime, but Bea took a hunk of bread, two apples and some cheese down the path to the beach and did not scold Janie for soaking her hem as she bent over the tide pools. Up above them, the sky was empty. In the distance, the Elizabeth Islands lay green and low. Skip a stone with me, said Janie. Her brother knew how, her sisters too. Bea’s brother had also known how. She, in her memory, had never tried. Together she and Janie found flat stones, bent their wrists in, flicked and watched the stones sail over the water and sink down.

“No matter,” said Bea.

“Yes, matter.” Janie flung a stone over her shoulder in the wrong direction, where it disappeared among its kind.

“You’ll learn,” Bea said.

“You’ve got to teach me.”

“Aye.”

If not Bea, then who? Janie’s sisters ignored her, mostly. Picked her up now and then, whirled her or bossed her, then ran off to places where she was not, under Bea’s watch, allowed to go. They disappeared down paths. They went up to the attic, where it was too hot to breathe, and came down dressed like tramps or vamps and laughing too hard, for show.

“You can’t.” And now there was a hard fury in Janie’s eyes. Now there was a blue-black rage she’d never let her parents see. “You can’t. You don’t know how.”

Never enough, never enough, and why should it be, water not blood, wages not a womb. Except that Janie loved Bea, and in no casual way, and Bea knew this—had always known it—to be true. Except that the love she felt for this child was the thickest love, aside from what she’d felt for her own mother, that Bea had ever known.

II

T
HE OTHER TWO
untethered, set free: it was what Helen lived for, and why, as spring in Grace Park showed itself each year crocused and forsythiaed, the changes registered for her not as themselves but as signals of migration toward Ashaunt. She was, by temperament (how often had she heard it?), a high-strung, restless girl, and thus subject to constant chiding—from Agnes and Bea, from her teachers. Don’t leave a trail of clothes and shoes and broken-backed books; go to bed before midnight; organize your desk—you are no longer a child! Finish finish finish what you’ve begun! Live up to your potential (her end-of-year marks were high in some subjects but not in all, and she had not gotten Best in Class). Even her mother, who largely left her children’s manners to the nurses, found her daughter’s energy an irritant: stop
circling
(Helen walked as she talked, walked as she read. When forced to sit, she jiggled; her right leg had a little motor of its own). Or worse, her mother saying, almost desperately, Could you just stop
talking
, darling, and Helen’s eyes would prick with angry tears.

Of all the adults, only her father, locked in his wheelchair, seemed unbothered by her, and only he could stop her in her tracks. A tidbit from the newspaper, she’d offer forth to him, or a Shakespeare sonnet she had memorized, then feel hope rising: Say it, Daddy—
Sharpest knife in the drawer
, or even just
Good girl
—his eyes resting, settling (and so she’d settle too) on her face. Or not. Increasingly, as his body warred against him, as the war warred, his dark moods intensified. If no response came from him, her own seep of darkness, but she did not have to stay with it; she could leave him there, stuck in his corner. She was young, she had legs, she could run.

On Ashaunt it was first to the water with Dos, no matter how cold it was. Most years they stripped naked at the dock, but this year, soldiers, so they swam in their underclothes, then darted to the house, to the tub with its familiar ring of rust, water sputtering out cold, then lukewarm, the two of them peeling off their clothes, stepping in (when had her sister gotten so pretty, with her mop of ringlets and little sorbet mounds of breasts?). With the water finally right, they were jostling for space, and soon again out, into peg-leg trousers and summer tops. “Teal Rock,” Helen said, and again they were off, past Janie who called out, to their bikes in the garage, down the road to the path behind the Stricklands’, to the rock with its cliff faces, and so—finally—they climbed.

There at the top, they stood first in the wind, then back on the path where huckleberry bushes bloomed white-pink among poison ivy and the air was nearly still. Only then did they stop to catch their breath.

“I hope he doesn’t die,” Dossy said abruptly.

Helen bent to pick a dried-up lily of the valley and inhale its faint scent. “He’s in Texas, Dos. Not in a foxhole somewhere. Gosh. You’re as bad as Mummy.”

“You don’t worry?”

“Not a bit.”

Their brother—also their father—thought worry was for sissies. This was, after all, a just and necessary war, and Charlie wanted nothing more than to reach the stage when he could pilot his own plane and get shipped out. She would not rend her garments and keen like a woman in a Greek tragedy because her brother was at Army Air Corps training camp. If anything, she envied him. To learn to fly a plane, perhaps even help change the course of history. To fly! Still, from the moment they’d arrived, she’d felt his absence everywhere, even more than in Grace Park. She missed his fun, that was it—missed how he’d have told them to quit making a scene about his being away. She missed how
happy
he made people; he was lighter than the rest of them, fleet. He was cocky, headstrong and only sporadically interested in school; still, somehow, he was the golden boy and impossible for even her to resent. When she was six and he ten, he had snuck her out on a sailboat to Penikese Island, just the two of them. He was the one who had named her Hellion. He was madly in love, now, with Suky, her best friend, making Helen at once linchpin and third wheel. His letters were filled with jokes, patriotism and cheery complaints about the food. All of them wanted and did not want him to earn his wings.

In front of them, the sea was ruffled by a light wind; a lobster boat passed in the distance. You could look and never even know there was a war.

She turned to Dossy. “Let’s go meet the soldiers at the gate.”

“Really? Just like that?”

“Sure. They must be lonely and bored, out here for months on their own. It’s our duty to cheer them up.”

“What will we say?”

“Good day, good soldiers.” Helen curtsied in her trousers. “Welcome to Ashaunt!”

“But they’re already here. We’ve only just arrived.”

“So? It’s ours.” She scowled. “Do you think there’s one passably handsome or smart fellow in the bunch?”

“You may not fall in love and leave me.”

“I never would. They’re just ordinary boys from anywhere. Foot soldiers, not like Charlie. You’re the one I should worry about.”

“Me? I’m fourteen!” When Dossy laughed, curls blowing, dimples creasing, she looked like a cross between Shirley Temple and Rita Hayworth.

“You’re too pretty,” Helen told her. “And you’d wander off with anyone.”

They started down the rock and along the kelp-strewn beach, where sand fleas rose in swarms at every step.

“We could bring Janie too, as an icebreaker,” said Helen. “Everyone loves a little girl.”

“Janie? Over Bea’s dead body.”

“Bea too, then. Soldiers love dead bodies.”

“
Don’t
,” said Dossy. “You scare me when you talk like that.”

Helen sprinted ahead. At the start of the path she paused to wait, but as soon as Dossy saw her stop, she stopped too, waiting until she started up again, and so Dossy matched her pace—start stop, start stop—the distance between them remaining stubbornly the same. They reached the road, continuing on like this, and might have kept it up the whole way home were it not for the army truck approaching from the end of the Point. Dossy broke into a trot and Helen stopped, so that by the time the truck passed, they were standing together, arms linked, ready with a smile and a wave.

III

I
T WAS A
week into summer, as Bea returned from swimming with Agnes, that she met Smitty for the first time.

“Good afternoon, young ladies.” He took off his cap.

They laughed. Beatrice was thirty-six, Agnes thirty-four.

“Good afternoon, young soldier,” Agnes said, bolder, prettier. As a girl, she had won medals for her dancing, the Sword Dance, the Highland Fling.

The soldier was tall and broad, red-faced from the sun, and no boy himself from the look of him. “Oh,” he said. “Blimey! Not from these parts?”

“Scotland,” said Agnes. “And yourself?”

“Me? Shipped to this hunk of rock from Saint Louis, Missoura.” He turned to Bea. “And you, miss?”

Bea wore a towel coat over her bathing suit. Her white rubber swim shoes stuck to the paved road. Her hair—always her best feature, thick and brown—was damp; the swim cap never kept the water out. The rest of her was pink and salty, a slab of fish. Behind them, the maids were coming along; they always swam at the dock at the same hour, and those who could not swim watched. “Me? Scotland as well.”

“Better to be here right now,” he said. “You watch the little blond girl, don’t you? And the older ones? They come to the gate.”

She nodded. The maids, all four of them, had caught up now, hovering. Their hour break was almost up.

“Cute kid, the little one—reminds me of my niece,” he said. “Bring her by when I’m on gate duty. I’ll take you to the P.X. when I get off. She can pick out a candy bar. You ladies too.”

Bea shook her head. “I thought . . . the sign says—”

“You’re neighbors, I can get clearance in a flash. Anyway, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?”

He looked at her, then. Later, she would have to wonder why, with the flock of them all there, it was she that he fixed on. She should have said no, the child’s parents would never allow it. She should have stayed on her own side of the fence. Instead, her mouth twitched into a small smile.

“Sergeant Raymond Smith.” He tipped his cap. “Smitty. And you?”

Her voice was thin. “Beatrice. Bea.”

“She’s Nurse Beatrice Emily Grubb,” Agnes said, and the others rocked with laughter.

“A nurse?” he asked.

Stanching the blood, cleaning the stumps of soldiers. It was the most important work, and in another life she might have done it well, but she was grateful not to have to.

“Children’s nurse,” she said. “Janie’ll be needing me. It’s time I get back.”

“Jane’s all the world’s fighting ships and aircraft,” said Smitty.

She had no idea what he meant.

IV

S
PEED BONNIE BOAT
like a bird on the wing, onward the sailors cry, carry the lad that’s born to be king, over the sea to Skye
. Her grandmother had sung it to her mother, and her mother had sung it to Bea (no matter that none of them had ever been to Skye), and Bea sang it to Janie when the child came to her in the night and slipped into bed and asked for nothing, just turned her back and lay, waiting for a cuddle and a song. The songs rose of their own accord from Bea’s half-waking body:
Can you no hush your weeping-o, ah the wee birds are sleeping-o . . .
Once Janie was asleep, Bea would lift her up, take her back to her own room—it was getting harder as the girl grew bigger—and tuck her in. In Grace Park, she had to walk out her bedroom door, into the hall and through Janie’s door to return the child, but on the Point their rooms were connected by an inside door, and each also had a door to the hall. They never spoke of these visits in the morning, so that sometimes Bea wondered if Janie even remembered that she’d come.