Clemmie dropped the leash and held her cup with two hands. Robert handed Hope an ice cube. He supposed he should be hobnobbing. His business had largely come back, but he wanted to build it. He wanted to have money now. For a future. He liked his present company, though.
“Shall we?” he said to Clemmie and took her cup.
“Shall we what?” she said, and giggled.
* * *
“Hmm,” Polly said. She crept around until her back was to the Looses and linked arms with Heidi. “Yes,” she said, hoping she could pick up the thread after the next remark. It embarrassed her that James stood among them, in front of everybody, but he was a grown man, nearly a robust sixty, out from under her roof for over forty years now, and she shouldn’t—Agnes often reminded her—blame herself for how his character had developed. Polly often thought of a moment at a birthday party when James was eight. In those days birthday parties were social occasions for the mothers, too, an excuse for daytime cocktails. Polly left Theo and Knox at home with Dick and the housekeeper and took James and Lydia to a party, knowing a baby girl was always welcome. The house was the same as her house but a few blocks away. Same furniture, lamps, books, plants. Colonial taste. Every woman strived for an original touch on top of the respectable. This woman had modern art, which Polly complimented expectedly.
The time came when Lydia needed a change, and Polly located the bathroom. When she came out, she happened to look down the hallway and saw James at the other end. He had his eyes closed and his arms outstretched and he was turning in circles, counting. Every time his fingers brushed the wall, he whispered a number and began again. Polly was so surprised she pretended she hadn’t noticed him. She went back to the living room and handed Lydia around. Later in the party the hostess announced a game of pin the tail on the donkey. Polly blushed. So that was what James was doing in the hall. She shuddered. What kind of child practiced to win a game at a birthday party? Who was he that he’d poked around to discover what the game would be?
She asked him about it on the way home, while Lydia slept in her carriage. “Don’t you think it’s nicest when winning a game is fair and square?”
James shot her a wary look that portrayed his opinion that she’d just betrayed him irrevocably, an attrition made more fraught by the fact that his cheating had betrayed her. But her moral dimension wasn’t supposed to supersede her focus on him.
“I won, Mummy.” His eyes dim. His tone ice. She’d lost him. She was too much of a girls’ school girl to ever be of use to him, and he was too conniving for her to ever feel truly proud.
Polly had seen bits of herself and Dick in James over the years, but that was the day she first recognized her son as someone completely separate from them, too—someone unto himself. Reflecting on it now, the inclinations toward premeditation and victory revealed on that day seemed to directly enable James’s current affiliation with the Looses. He wanted to win above all. Polly hadn’t understood who James was then and she didn’t now. She loved him, though—the imperative of motherhood.
She couldn’t watch any longer. Maud had taken a seat at a table across the lawn, and when Polly made eye contact with her, Maud waved, inviting her to join.
“Excuse us,” Polly said, and squeezed Heidi’s arm. “Let’s go sit with Maud.”
Heidi looked over at Maud and smiled. She was better now that she was out of the hospital and on the Point, but Polly had thought she might be further along by now. The restoration of Heidi’s health was the major project these days. Heidi should have a life, that was the main goal. There was no telling how much further Heidi had to go before she was legally compos mentis. They decided to accept fate as it unspooled. Polly talked to Heidi steadily as they crossed the lawn. She named things as if Heidi were a child, until Heidi finally briefly leaned her head on Polly’s shoulder and said, “I know.”
* * *
Agnes tore her flimsy blouse on a broken tree branch, and Grace loomed up from the grave to scold her for not thinking about her clothes before going into the forest. She’d pomp if she saw me now, leaving a party and tearing my clothes. Grace had suspected her daughter of being a lesbian. Why else would Agnes have broken off with a perfect match like John Manning? Squandered opportunities were perverse. Oh, that voice, still in Agnes’s head. Lachlan appeared aphoristically, but her mother was right there in front of her, hands on hips. Agnes shuddered and forced her attention to the immediate. The Sank.
Robert kept it up so beautifully, changed nothing, only clearing away the debris and dead branches, making room for the sun to reach the ground. The moss and ground cover yearned toward the spears of light, and the shadows were bubbles of cool. Agnes stepped lightly, like the indigenous people did in the novels she’d read on rainy afternoons. She and Elspeth had practiced for hours when they were children, making no sound, taking care not to break even the most brittle twig. They sat on the site of the old Native summer camp and imagined being Indian girls. What imagination was that? What was it to build such a fantasy? They took scraps of what they heard and read and combined them with the feel of holding the objects collected from the site in their hands, and they came up with versions of themselves who ate different food and wore different clothes. They couldn’t imagine being a person like Mary Mitchell, the girl who’d been arrested for shooting the eagles. They would never think of shooting eagles and rejected those who did. Yet Mary Mitchell was a principled girl, just as they’d been.
What could one do with people whose beliefs were opposite your own?
She looked up at the nest. An eagle flapped out and away, miffed at her intrusion. “Sorry, bird,” Agnes said. She no longer knew each one by name, but she still loved the sound of eagle wings beating the air. They cleaved the atmosphere and created temporary yet provocative blank spaces that drew the imagination upward to explore their wake. Agnes stared into the blank space and saw—loss. Her family, gone. Virgil, gone. Grace Lee’s face, crumpled after Edmund died. The end of her beauty. The end of her interest in life. The memory still had the power to rile Agnes’s insides. She shook her head. What were these thoughts? She should be getting back. Just a quick stop by the summer camp on the way. She put her sandals back on for the trek so she could walk more quickly. She’d already shown how tough she was.
* * *
Maud was getting hungry. She and Polly made sure Heidi took a seat that faced the view before Maud set off for plates of food. From growing up in the Village, Maud knew how to walk through a group of strangers looking pleasant and unapproachable, but this practice felt cagey and inappropriate on the Point, where there was no cover, nowhere to hide, no horde of commuters to disappear into. I belong here, Maud reminded herself, and though it was real and true, she still couldn’t believe it. She and Robert had moved Heidi up to Fellowship Point in March, and Maud and Clemmie had recently arrived to stay for a few weeks, staying in what had become their house in the Rookerie. They were putting the finishing touches on Agnes’s novel, and Maud was still coaxing Agnes to write a real memoir. They’d taken over a house in the Rookerie as a writing studio. There they were able to leave their books open and their pages spread out knowing no one else would disturb anything—though they had seen Sylvie peering through the windows. Agnes wondered why she’d never thought of working there before. “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” Maud teased.