Up Island (27 page)

that he thought he wouldn’t need anybody past March or April. I thought he meant he’d be well by then, and he’d leave, but I guess maybe that wasn’t what he meant…”

Her voice, suddenly frail and old, trailed off, but when I looked at her I saw that the tears had not stopped. They slid silently down the big, seamed, brown face, leaving trails like a snail’s on earth.

I looked over at the door of the smaller camp. My mother’s lacy black hat stood out against the pocked white like a spider on old snow. It looked fixed, inexorable. This is my outpost in this place, it said. Here I live. Get in here and start doing what you know you should be doing.

I took another deep breath, feeling it shake in my lungs.

“Mrs. Ponder,” I said again, “I’m never going to ask you what’s wrong between you and your son. I don’t even want to know. But if I should stay and try to do some things for him—and I said
if
—he’ll have to stop talking to me like he just did. I really can’t have that. And you’ll have to stop trying to manipulate me.
And
I insist on at least having the visiting nurse; why couldn’t he just pay her if he wants to pay somebody?”

“She doesn’t take pay. She’s a county service,” Bella said.

Her voice was still soft and even deferential, but it was two decades younger. “Denny wouldn’t take county help, and I wouldn’t ask for it. My God, our people come from royalty back in Portugal, ours and his; he’s named for King Dinis, who was a direct forebear. Everybody who knows anything at all about the Portuguese knows about King Dinis. He was called the troubadour king, the poet king. He built more than a hundred castles in

UP ISLAND / 231

Portugal in the twelfth century. I think Denny gets his talent from him; he writes beautiful poetry. Some of it’s been published. You think a Miara from Coimbra is going to take charity?”

Oh, God, I thought, nearly overcome with a great, helpless, white fatigue. This poor, awful, grotesque, proud, silly old woman. She would have recognized my mother in a nano-second. They’re the same person. Who on earth would bother with her and her awful, dying son?

But I knew who was probably going to bother.

I reached across her into the glove compartment of the Cherokee and pulled out the pad and ballpoint pen that Livvy kept there. I wrote on it; I scribbled for quite a long time.

Then I jerked the sheet from the pad and gave it to her. She read it carefully, her face impassive but still tear-stained, and gave it back to me and nodded. I folded the sheet small and took it up on the front porch of the larger camp and pushed it under the closed door and came back to the Jeep.

“Get somebody to come get his answer in the morning, and call me and tell me what it is,” I said. “I want him to sign it, too. If he agrees to it—
all
of it, everything—I’ll take the camp. I’ll try to keep it and look after him a little, with some outside help when I think I need it, if and until he gets so he needs hospitalizing. I’m out of it then, no questions asked.

I may stay on after that, or I may not. I’ll try to let you know as far ahead as possible if I don’t. And I’ll only do this if you agree not to put me in the middle of whatever this mess between you is, and if you both agree that I can call the visiting nurse or somebody whenever I think it’s necessary.

That’s it. No more talking.”

Bella smiled. It tried its best to be a humble smile,
232 / Anne Rivers Siddons

but triumph oozed from it like sap from a maple tree. For some reason, that came near to amusing me. I would have been somehow disappointed if I could so easily bring this elemental force to her knees, I knew. Disappointed and perhaps just a bit frightened of my own power. I had never been able to do that with my own mother. It would have been disconcerting, to say the least, to be able to do it with anyone else’s.

We did not speak again until I had reached the farmhouse and opened the door on her side to help her get out and make her way up the steps. After I had hauled her to her feet, she put her hand on my arm and looked down into my face. Few people are able to do that. It was an odd sensation.

“I want to thank you for what you’re doing,” she said, and shook her head impatiently as I started to speak. “I don’t mean about Denny; there’s no way I can thank you for that.

I mean what you’re doing for Luz. I was about one day from having to call somebody about those swans. The last two times I’ve gone down to feed them, I thought I wouldn’t get back. And I couldn’t let them starve. And I sure couldn’t ask anybody else to feed them and bust up that ice all winter.

They’d laugh in my face. Not that folks around here are mean to animals, I’ll give you that, but they’ve got other things on their minds, and they sure aren’t sentimental about swans.

There’s too many of them pecking around up here, and they do too much damage. Somebody would have just shot them and that would have been that. It would have killed Luz. So I thank you.”

Then she took my arm and, leaning heavily on it, made her way back up the steps and into the old house, stopping every few seconds so she could gulp in air. When we finally got inside, her face was nearly

UP ISLAND / 233

purple, and sweat ran down it like rain. I put her into a chair beside Luz’s bed and got a glass of water from the dark old kitchen. It smelled of spices and tomatoes and illness.

She sipped the water, and Luz smiled at us, an irresistible smile, full of joy and gaiety. It moved me even more than Bella’s tears had.

“I knew you were going to save the swans,” she said. “I said so before you left for the camp. Didn’t I, Bella? I said,

‘Bella, this is our
Santa Cisna,
who’s going to take care of Charles and Di for us. I’ve prayed every night to the Virgin to send her. And here she is.’ I said that.”

As soon as I satisfied myself that Bella Ponder could breathe again, I left and went out to the Cherokee. I drove back to Chappaquiddick with the radio tuned to a Boston FM station playing Baroque music. Halfway between West Tisbury and Edgartown
The Water Music
began, spilling its liquid notes out into the car, and I grinned at the radio.

“Okay,” I said aloud. “I know a conspiracy when I hear one.”

I knew that Dennis Ponder would agree to my terms. I could not have said how, but I knew it as certainly as I knew that it was the On Time Ferry whose deck wallowed beneath my tires, and not the
QE2.
Everything about this strange, freighted morning was bright with portent. And though I had no wish at all to be anyone’s
santa,
of the swans or anything else, I was glad of the knowledge. The song of the little camp and the glade and the pond was loud in my ears; it swam in and out among Handel’s silvery notes, playing with them, vaulting over them. I knew I had been right about up island.

234 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I felt almost manic with anticipation, as gleeful as a child with a daring, secret plan, when I went into the old house on Katama Bay. But I had no sooner sat down at the kitchen desk and pulled the telephone to me to begin the series of calls I had to make than the great, glittering brightness outside curled into the kitchen like smoke and wrapped around me, and the elation left. In its place was the crawling unease I had felt here for the last two days. I got up and went to the porch door and looked out, looking both ways and up into the sky to see whose prowling shape I seemed to almost catch from the corner of my eye. But there was nothing, only the fractured diamond surface of the dancing bay, and the late summer light playing in the trees and grasses that bent in the wind, and the shadows of the small clouds that rocketed across the afternoon sky. The wind was hard; I could hear it making a crooning sound that had little to do with summer and soft, golden light; it prowled in my blood and bones.

The vista from the porch was too big by far, too exposed. I pulled the curtains and sat back down. The restlessness in me that wind and space called up came very near to fear. But with the curtains drawn and the lamps lit, I felt better.

I did not think I could stay much longer in the house on the water, though. Not this house. Not this water.

First I called Teddy at school and, miraculously, reached him at his apartment. He was home for lunch, he said, and I smiled, seeing in my mind as well as hearing the sandwich that bulged in his cheek as he spoke. It struck me that I would love little more right then than to make a sandwich for my son, and I played the scene out in my mind, and found to my

UP ISLAND / 235

amazement I could not picture my own kitchen. Instead, I saw myself slicing bread and spreading mayonnaise in the cramped kitchen of the camp in the glade, scrubbed now and bright with fall flowers and noon light.

I told him what I was going to do, and he nearly choked on the sandwich and then laughed aloud.

“Way to go, Ma,” he crowed. “My Robinson Crusoe mom!

What brought this on, as if I didn’t know?”

Suddenly I did not want to tell him that my house was, in effect, not mine anymore. It sounded impossibly theatrical, nauseatingly poor me. It was, after all, Teddy’s house, too; why had I not considered where he would go if he wanted to come home? This separation was, after all, about other people as well as me. It had been that that had outraged me from the beginning, and yet in all the time I was falling in love with the camp, I had not thought of Teddy.

“It’s not a sure thing yet,” I said, feeling my grand adventure deflate like a circus balloon. “I wasn’t going to do it without consulting you…”

“Well, I think it’s cool,” he said. “How long do you think you’ll stay? A month? Two?”

“Well…actually, I thought longer than that. Through the winter, at least. Teddy…there are some reasons I don’t feel I can come back to Atlanta for a while. Missy thinks it’s best, too. I can’t…it’s probably not a good idea for me to live in the house for a while, and money’s going to be a little tight, not that that’s anything for you to worry about. It won’t affect you…”

“Is he cutting off your money?” my son said, and there was ice and pain in his voice.

“No,” I said. “It’s my own decision. As I said, it’s
236 / Anne Rivers Siddons

not going to affect you. But listen, I thought you might like to come spend Thanksgiving with me up here. We can have a real, old-fashioned New England Thanksgiving. Maybe Grandpop can come, too. It’s really very beautiful up here.

I’d love to show it to you…”

There was a silence, and then he said, “Ma, since you aren’t going to be home anyway—in Atlanta, I mean—would you care if I went camping with some of the guys? There’s a guy in my structures class who lives near the Anasazi ruins in Arizona, and a bunch are going. I’d give my eyeteeth to see that. But listen, if you’re going to be up there by yourself—”

“I’m not going to be by myself,” I said hastily. “The Anasazi, wow! I’d kill you if you
didn’t
go. I’ll call Grandpop. I bet he’d love to rough it in the woods…”

“Mom, he’s going to Aunt Sally’s folks’ with them. I talked to him the other night. Listen, why don’t you call Caroline?

What better company for Thanksgiving than a new baby?

In Tennessee, if not up there…”

“Well, that’s just what I’ll do,” I said heartily, knowing that I would not. Caroline had not yet mustered the nerve to take the baby to the park by herself. She would faint at the very thought of up island. My throat closed up; I had had no idea how much I missed Teddy until I heard his voice. Missed and loved him; loved him enough to insist that he try his new wings.

“If they can’t come or you can’t go there, just call me. I’ll be there with bells on,” he said.

“No need, I’ve met a lot of people up here who’re looking out for me,” I said lightly. “I’m the belle of the bay.”

“I’ll bet. Any interesting guys? Any action?”

UP ISLAND / 237

“Only one,” I said. “And he’s as mean as a snake and one-legged besides.”

Forgive me, Dennis, I said to myself. But right now you’re more use to me as fodder to amuse my son than anything else. And besides, you owe me.

“Just your speed,” Teddy said, and we laughed together.

Even over the telephone, even with the disappointment and the missing, it felt good.

I meant to call my father next, but instead I stretched out on the sofa, and slid instantly into a long and vivid dream about my mother. It was not the usual dream about the grated subterranean window, or at least not just that. It began in the same way, but it went farther into the country of nightmare and panic than I had ever been in my dreams before, and I know that I will remember the precise, sweating texture of that dream until the day that I die.

It started out the same: with me on the city street looking down to see the barred subterranean window where my mother always sat in the black hat, waiting. But this time the window was empty, and I turned to my father, who stood beside me in the crowd, and said, “She’s not there.”

“Maybe she’s found what she was waiting for,” my father said, looking around. I looked around, too, and saw my mother standing ahead of us on the sidewalk, facing backward in the crowd so that she looked at us. She wore the hat, and she was smiling with pleasure and sweetness. In my dream my heart gave a great fish leap of joy. I knew that she was dead, but nevertheless, there she was, smiling her approval at me. I did not point her out to my father, who was still looking about eagerly, or any of the crowd going past, lest they become aware of her suddenly, and somehow
238 / Anne Rivers Siddons

frighten her away. It seemed, with the senseless sense of dreams, entirely possible for my dead mother to be with me as long as I did not call attention to her. I did not understand why my father could not see her, though.

I went close to her and whispered, “I’m so glad to see you.

You look so pretty in that hat.”

I did not point out to her that I knew she was dead. It was as if she herself did not know, that for her to know would be to lose her.

“I’ve always liked this hat,” she said. It was her voice, no doubt of that, low and full and with that hint of husky theatricality that I had always so envied. “I don’t think there’s anything like a big hat to play up a woman’s eyes. I’d give it to you, but it’s meant for somebody else.”