The Eyes of the Amaryllis Page 4

  “I’m sure you see it that way, Geneva,” said the woman, “but I couldn’t go and marry everyone, now, could I? Anyway, Nicholas was so…solemn. Oh, I liked him at first, but after a while he just got too…well, too solemn, as I say. About as much fun as an old sheep. And I never could see what that silly statue had to do with anything.”

  Gran started to speak, stopped, and turned to look at Jenny, who was sitting open-mouthed, listening. “Geneva,” she said, “I’d very much appreciate it if you’d go up to your room for a while. I’ll call you down later.”

  “But, Gran!” Jenny protested, and then, seeing the look in her grandmother’s eye, she said, almost meekly, “All right.” She went out into the hall and up the stairs, as slowly as she dared, but there was silence in the parlor, and once in her room, when the conversation started up again, she could hear nothing more than a murmur from the two women. After a time, however, their voices rose suddenly and the words were audible.

  “Listen to the pot calling the kettle black!” cried the visitor. “You’re a fine one, Geneva Reade, to talk about sparing a person’s feelings! Everyone knows how you neglected that boy of yours after the Captain drowned. Why, you never cared a straw for George. It was just the Captain, the Captain, always the Captain, until—”

  “Leave this house, Isabel Cooper,” Gran thundered, “and never come back. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  Crisp footsteps in the hall, and then: “But, Geneva, it’s raining outside, and Harley isn’t back yet. You can’t expect me to—”

  “Yes, I can,” said Gran, and Jenny could imagine the grim expression on her grandmother’s face. “Goodbye, Isabel.”

  The sound of the door opening and closing. A moment of silence. Next the thump as Gran’s crutch swung her back to the parlor. Then nothing but the rain and the slosh of waves. But Jenny sat on her father’s bed, and the visitor’s words hung in her ears, so that she did not hear anything else. “You never cared a straw for George.” Could it be true? And all at once the little tin trumpet seemed the saddest thing in the world to her. What chance had its thin sound ever had, trying to be heard above the tide?

  When Jenny came downstairs again, she found Gran standing at the window behind her chair, staring out at the sea. Searching for something to say, Jenny managed at last, “She’s not very nice, that woman who was here.”

  “No,” said Gran, without turning around. “She isn’t, and wasn’t. The face of an angel, even now, but in no way like an angel otherwise.”

  “Did Nicholas Irving really drown himself because of her?” asked Jenny.

  “So they say,” said Gran. She came away from the window and sat down in her chair. She looked exhausted. “Geneva, people do strange things for love sometimes. You’re old enough to realize that.”

  A silence fell between them. Jenny fingered a fold of her pinafore, and then she said, with difficulty, “Gran, didn’t you love my father?”

  “You mustn’t think such things,” said Gran stiffly. “Forget you ever heard it. That woman—Isabel—she’s a fool. She understands nothing at all. The only thing she cares about is what others think of her. To people like that, the rest of the world is there just to hold up a mirror for them to see their own reflection in. She never understood poor Nicholas, and she doesn’t understand anything about your father and me. He’s my son. Of course I love him. We don’t agree on certain things, that’s all. Put it out of your mind.” She turned away and took up the almanac. “High tide at five o’clock. An hour from now,” she announced, staring down at the page. Then she closed the almanac and laid it aside. “This rain is going to be with us for a while, Geneva,” she said. “You’ll need something to keep you dry. Go upstairs to the back bedroom and look in the bottom of that big trunk, the one where we found the sea gull. I think there’s an old oilskin there somewhere that your father had when he was about your age. And a sou’wester, too.”

  Upstairs, Jenny knelt before the trunk and lifted its great domed lid. The trumpet and the cannon were lying on top of the accumulation inside, but she did not pick them up again. Instead, she thrust a hand down under the layers of odds and ends, searching for the slick feel of the oilskin. At last she found it and, as carefully as she could, began to pull it up and out, trying not to disturb the things resting on top of it. But this appeared to be impossible, and as she gave the oilskin a final yank to free it, it brought up with it, caught in the stiffness of a too-long-folded sleeve, a small, square leather box which tumbled out onto the floor.

  She left the oilskin dangling from the trunk and, picking up the box, tried to open it. There was a little metal knob sticking out of its front side and this she pressed firmly. At first nothing happened, but a stronger jab released an inner catch, and the lid sprang open. The box was lined with purple velvet, and there, resting in a depression that fit it exactly, lay a wafer-thin gold pocket watch. It was a handsome thing, much more handsome than the watches for sale in her father’s store, the kind he carried himself: of some metal that was silver-colored but not silver, and thick as a thumb. Jenny eased the gold watch out of its nest and turned it over. The back was engraved with curling vines and leaves, and in the center a small square, left plain, was marked with the single initial R.

  Jenny had often opened the back of her father’s watch to look at the works, so intricate, fitted so precisely into their round, neat skull. She pried this one open now with a fingernail, and peered in. And then her eye fell on the inside of the lifted back, and she saw that it, too, was engraved:

  MORGAN READE 1818

  GEORGE MORGAN READE 1857

  George Morgan Reade. That was her father! She stood up, tucking the stiff, creased oilskin under her arm, and went downstairs, the watch cupped carefully in one palm. “Gran,” she said, going into the parlor, “look what I found! It’s got my father’s name in it.”

  Gran had been studying the almanac again, and looked up from it vaguely, as if it were an effort to bring herself out of her thoughts. But when Jenny put the watch into her hand, her eyes cleared. “Dear heaven!” she exclaimed. “It’s your grandfather’s watch.”

  “But it has Papa’s name in it, too,” said Jenny. “Look—it’s on the inside of the lid.”

  Gran opened the back and stared at the names engraved there. “Yes. I remember now. Your grandfather got this watch on his twenty-first birthday, from his father. But he never carried it with him when he went to sea. He used to say it was too special, that it might get lost or stolen, and that he wanted to save it for…George. For George’s twenty-first birthday. He had the name and date put in long before, to be ready.”

  “But, Gran! Papa’s way past twenty-one by now. Why didn’t you ever give it to him?”

  “I forgot,” said Gran. “I clean forgot all about it. When the time came, your father had been a long time in Springfield. I remember sending him a letter, to wish him a happy birthday, but I just plain forgot about this.”

  “It would’ve meant a lot to Papa, I expect, to have it,” said Jenny disapprovingly. “You should’ve remembered.”

  “Now you’re angry,” said Gran, and the tired look came back to her face.

  “Well, I just don’t understand it,” said Jenny. “What’s the trouble with you and Papa, anyway?”

  “Geneva, dear child,” said Gran, “I don’t know how to explain it to you, or even if I should try. But—well—your father, he’s a fine man, but he just doesn’t see. After the Amaryllis went down, he kept saying to me, ‘It’s over.’ And he wanted me to move back to Springfield and start a new life. But I didn’t want a new life. I wanted this one, and I didn’t believe it was over. I wanted to stay here where I could be close to…the ship, where I could wait. Your grandfather and I—what we felt for each other doesn’t just stop. Remember what we talked about the first night you were here? There’s another world around us, Geneva, around us all the time, and here I can be closer to it. But your father—he doesn’t sense the other world around him; he
doesn’t see that things don’t end. If he did, he wouldn’t be so frightened. Ever since his father drowned, he’s been terrified of endings. He thinks of the sea the way other people think of graveyards, and he can’t stand this place because it keeps reminding him. That’s why he ran away—to run away from endings. He was very young, and some people thought I was wrong to allow the separation. But what could I have done? He couldn’t stay here, and I couldn’t leave.”

  She paused and ran a fingertip over the names engraved inside the lid of the gold watch. And then she said, “This watch, now—it’s like a sign in itself, isn’t it? A sign from father to son. The numbers stand on the face in an endless circle, and the hands will keep going round and round when we wind it up. But George wouldn’t have seen it like that. He’d only have seen an old watch that had stopped—time come to an end—and he wouldn’t have wanted to have it. Do you understand?”

  Jenny stood staring at Gran, and could feel herself pulled between them, her father and her grandmother. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Gran stared back at her and then she pulled herself up out of her chair and stood tall. “Enough,” she said. “Come. High tide.”

  And so, another useless search, another supper. But things felt very different. The rain continued, filling in the chinks of silence that would fall between them, Gran and Jenny, no matter how hard they tried to keep a conversation going. Bedtime came as a welcome relief, and Jenny, protected by an earnest wish not to think about the watch, and the little tin trumpet, and the ugly words of the pretty Mrs. Owen, went to sleep almost at once.

  When Gran next called her, Jenny woke to find that the windows of her room were touched faintly with light, the pale beginnings of dawn. There was scarcely a breath of wind. She went to the window and saw that the sea had been transformed. It was hung with a thin fog, against which the rain still fell, straight down, with a whispering sound, hushed and dim. Downstairs, Gran was waiting with the oilskin and Jenny put it on obediently, but they both moved quietly, as if there were someone or something near that must not be awakened or disturbed. “We won’t need the lantern,” said Gran in a low voice. “It’s almost light. Geneva, I have a feeling that perhaps, this time…Come, let’s go out and begin.”

  The beach was ghostly, muffled, in the silvery half-light. The warm rain was so fine that it was almost a mist, but it raised tiny knobs on the surface of the swelling water, water that rolled so gently it did not crest, but merely flattened, sighing, on the sand, sliding far up to the bottom of the bluff with only the barest film of bubbles. The far horizon had vanished in the fog, and the swells seemed to be coming in from nowhere, only to this place and nowhere else, glinting with that same pale silver light that was part dawn, part fog, part rain. Jenny started off along the dark strip of sand with her hands deep in the pockets of the oilskin, feeling as if she were still asleep and dreaming, carrying the dream along around her.

  For the fog gave way ahead and closed behind her as she went, and the now-familiar landmarks, as they swam into focus, looked strange: the boulder, gleaming now with rain; the withered scrub-pine stump decked with moisture-beaded spiderwebs; the rotted dock, its far end faint in fog out over the water; and finally another bluff that marked the limit of that arm of the search, soft now, its rough grass leaning and heavy with raindrops. She paused here, blinking, her cheeks wet under the brim of the old sou’wester. She could feel the silence and the waiting everywhere. And then she turned and started back.

  She had reached the scrub-pine stump again when she saw it: a dark something floating just within her sight, where the sea faded into the fog. It rose and fell on the soundless, shifting water, and with each swell it was brought a little closer to shore, a little closer to where she stood. “Driftwood,” she suggested to herself, but it did not look like driftwood. Its shape seemed too regular, too smooth. As she stood there, her eyes wide, straining to see more clearly, the wind lifted and the rain began to fall a little harder, digging tiny pockmarks in the sand. Riding a taller swell, the object rolled, submerged, bobbed up again, and Jenny saw a touch of color on its surface. “It isn’t driftwood,” she said aloud. “It’s—something else.”

  The object, floating now in sight, now lost between the swells, came nearer and nearer. Suddenly Jenny could wait no longer. She waded out, deeper and deeper, until at last she stood in water to her waist. Heaves of sea lifted the oilskin up around her and dragged at her, but her eyes were fixed on the object, and at last it washed into her reaching arms. Clutching it, she struggled back to shore, and stood there in the rain, holding the thing, staring down at it.

  It was made of wood and it was heavy with years of seeping water, but she saw at once what it was, in spite of its softened planes and curves, its barely visible residue of paint. She was holding in her arms the carved head of a woman, split at an angle across the lower face so that only a portion of the mouth remained. But the eyes, under heavy brows, were lidded and calm, the nose long and narrow, the section of mouth curved upward in a smile. And the hair, swept down from the brow in deep-carved strands, still held bright fragments of dark red color.

  Staring at the head, Jenny swallowed hard. And then she began to run down the beach, clumsy in the flapping oilskin, her heels thudding over the firm, wet sand, holding the wooden head tight against her chest. “Gran!” she cried. “Gran! I’ve got something!” The fog opened out ahead of her, and at last she could see her grandmother standing on the little bluff, a dim shape under a big umbrella. “Gran!” she cried again.

  “Quick!” came Gran’s voice. “Quick! Oh, Lord, it’s come! Yes, yes, child, bring it to me!”

  Jenny arrived breathless at the bottom of the bluff and struggled up, and Gran, dropping her crutch, flinging aside the umbrella, reached out and seized the wooden head. She took one look at it and sank down on the old bench, clasping the head to her bosom, rocking back and forth. “Geneva,” she cried, “do you know what this is? Do you see? It’s my head, from the ship! Heaven be praised, he’s sent me a sign at last!” Her voice broke and she began to weep, her words coming slow between deep, gasping breaths. “It’s the figurehead, Geneva—from my darling—from the Amaryllis—sent up from the bottom of the sea.”

  And the wind, rising, whispered around them: True to yo-o-o-ou.

  The rest of that day, and the next and the next, were as confused and cloudy as the first days had been calm and bright. Outside, the sky hung low, clouds drifting over clouds, and the rain fell softly, continuously, turning the sea and beach into a blur. Inside, Gran was feverish. She would talk, excitedly, and then lapse into silence, drop off to sleep for a moment, and wake to talk again. Jenny did not know what to do with her, and a vague alarm moved in to tremble in her stomach. The head from the Amaryllis lay on the table beside Gran’s chair in the parlor, and the calm smile on its carved face was more like the Gran Jenny knew than this agitated woman who sat, stood, stumped about, sat again, dozed exhausted, doing none of these for more than five minutes at a time, it seemed.

  Jenny took over the cooking, producing from Gran’s unfamiliar stores peculiar meals whose inharmonious parts were never ready at the same moment, never ready to the same degree of doneness; and she carried them in to the parlor on a tray, but Gran would scarcely touch them. “Geneva,” she would say, “did I ever tell you the story of how—” and would begin a tale told once so far that hour and twice the hour before, of her life in the old days with the Captain. For she called him “the Captain” now, not “your grandfather,” and she talked of nothing, no one, else, putting out her hand again and again to touch the wooden head. And then, in the middle of the story, her voice would fade and she would fall asleep, her head bowed down on her chest.

  It was clear from the brightness of her eyes and the flush on her cheeks that she was ill. But Jenny did not know how to find the doctor and was in any case afraid to leave her grandmother alone while she went out to look, for she feared that now, in addition to the fever, Gran might really be
going mad. The building in Springfield, the one with the dark, barred windows, was never far from her thoughts. “If the doctor comes,” she worried, “he’ll see how it is with her. He’ll send for my father and they’ll take her away.” And so she waited, helplessly.

  But at the end of the third day, late in the afternoon, she tiptoed in to the parlor from the kitchen and found that Gran was truly asleep at last, her breathing deep and regular. The flush was gone from her face, and her hands lay relaxed in her lap. The fever, at least, had passed. Weak with relief, Jenny smoothed the quilt over her grandmother’s knees, tucking it under, and sank down on a footstool near the window. Outside, the rain still fell, the swells still spilled across the sodden beach, and Jenny realized that she had not left the house since the day of the discovery. There had been no watching for the tides, no searching up and back along the sand. There was, of course, no need for searching now.

  Then, for the first time, she turned and looked—really looked—at the wooden head lying on the table next to her. Reaching out a hand, she ran her fingertips over its water-softened cheek. The surface, drying a little in the warmth of the lamp beside it, felt fuzzy, and the fragments of red paint in the deep-carved strands of hair were curling here and there, turning up their edges as they, too, dried in the lamplight. The head was real. There could be no doubt about that. The place where it had split from the rest of the body was lighter in color, and rougher, as if the break were recent: the wood was raw, not mellowed yet by the constant caress of salt water.

  Yes, the head was real. It had been a part of the Amaryllis, and now it was here. It had come—here. A queer coincidence. Perhaps. But it was here. Gran stirred in her sleep and her mouth curved into a smile, and Jenny saw how much her grandmother’s face still looked like this younger, wooden face carved so long ago—strong, handsome, a very good face. And all at once she remembered something the terrible and pretty Mrs. Owen had said to Gran: “She’s the image of you, Geneva—the very image.”