The Eyes of the Amaryllis Read online

  The very image? Did she, too, then, have a very good face? After all? Not ugly? Would someone, some shadowy someone, love her someday the way her grandfather had loved Gran? Or perhaps still loved Gran from…wherever he was? Unexpectedly, she found that she was blushing. “That’s silly,” she said aloud, and stood up, moved about the room, plumping pillows, bustling, embarrassed. But her heart had a new lightness, and the trembling in her stomach had disappeared.

  Gran woke in the morning, after the third long night in her chair, pale but refreshed. “What are we doing down here in the parlor?” she demanded as Jenny, sitting up from her own sleep on the sofa, greeted her. “Good grief, I’m stiff as a board.”

  “You’ve been sick, Gran,” said Jenny. “I was so worried—how do you feel?”

  “Well, now, let’s see,” said Gran doubtfully, patting herself here and there. “I seem to be all right, but I’m hungry as a bear. Yes, I remember now. Foolish old woman, to stand so long outside in the rain. And yet”—she turned to gaze at the wooden head—“it wasn’t entirely foolish.”

  They were quiet then. Jenny came to stand by Gran, and they both looked at the head, which smiled back serenely. “I knew it would happen,” said Gran, “and it did.” She put a gentle hand on her granddaughter’s arm. “Geneva,” she said, “remember this: nothing is impossible.”

  There followed three lighthearted days, in spite of the steady rain cocooning them, lighthearted for Jenny because Gran was all right again, better, in fact, than she had been before; lighthearted for Gran because her dearest wish had been granted. All of her old intensity, her obsession with the tides, was gone, to uncover, by its absence, a great capacity for pleasure.

  She taught Jenny how to play German whist; they read aloud; they made salt-water taffy. A new trunk was opened, revealing hats and dresses in the opulent style of the 1830’s and 40’s, and for hours they played at dressing up. Gran pulled out one tall-brimmed bonnet with plumes and ribbons and ruffled white lace, and, clapping it on her head, went to see herself in a mirror. “Well, it looked all right in its heyday,” she said, laughing at her reflection. “Or in my heyday, I should say. Wait. I know. Come with me.” She stumped to the parlor and, picking up the wooden head, placed the bonnet over the carved hair lovingly. “That’s the way it looked, more or less.” The head smiled indulgently. “No,” said Gran, removing the bonnet and laying the head back, gently, in its place. “What’s the matter with me? Blasphemy, almost. But your grandfather gave me this bonnet. How he would laugh to see the figurehead wearing it! He was a great laugher, that man. Everything amused him.”

  Jenny remembered, then, her father’s sober face. “Gran,” she said slowly, “if Papa could see the head, would it make him feel better? Would it make him love the sea again, and not be so afraid?”

  Gran turned and looked at her. “When he comes for you, the end of next week,” she said thoughtfully, “we’ll show it to him. And give him the watch. And see.”

  And so it came to a Friday again, and still the rain fell. The beach had a drowned, abandoned look, and in the afternoon Jenny, growing restless, put on the old oilskin and ventured out to look around. She had entirely lost track of the tides, but the sea seemed to her to have sunk beyond even its farthest point, slapping sullenly at the hard, ridged sand. Below the line of soggy seaweed, she found a sharp trail of new claw-prints, like little forks, etched cleanly in the sand, and following them she spotted at last the sea gull responsible, waddling discontentedly some distance ahead. His feathers looked bedraggled and askew, like an old shirt, ragged and none too clean. But when he heard her approaching, he opened perfect wings and, transformed, lifted into the air, beating off above the water, powerful and sure. Somehow his flight from her made her feel alien and wistful. She hung her head and started back along the empty beach, higher up, above the tide line. It seemed, now, to be a kind of trespassing to mark the smoother sand, where the gull had walked, with feet that did not belong there.

  It was because of this higher route home that she noticed the deep prints of a man’s heavy boots, stretching ahead of her near the edge of the sand where the wet grass leaned. The rims of the prints were softened from the rain, no longer crisp, as the gull’s prints had been, so Jenny knew that the man who had made them had come along some time before. But still she felt queer to see them there. Abruptly, she lost the sense that she was the intruder here. Instead, it now began to feel as if she herself—and Gran—had been intruded upon, on this sand that was theirs alone. She hurried back to the house and said to Gran, “There’s been a man walking on our beach.”

  And Gran, putting down her mending, frowned and said, “Seward.”

  At supper Gran said musingly, “I wonder if Seward knows the head has come.”

  “But how could he?” Jenny asked, surprised. “And, Gran, I don’t see why he should care about it, anyway. Unless,” she added quickly, “if he’s your friend and would be glad to see you happy.”

  “He’s not exactly…a friend,” said Gran.

  “Oh,” said Jenny. A vague apprehension filled her and she asked, a little timidly, “Is he a bad person?”

  Gran looked hard at her, as if she were trying to see inside her head. “Geneva,” she said, “it’s not a question of good or bad. It’s a question of whether he’s…” She paused.

  “Whether he’s what?” asked Jenny, frowning, fearful of what the answer would be.

  “Finish your supper,” said Gran. “We’ll talk in the parlor afterwards. I can see I’d better tell you the whole story.”

  The parlor, with the lamps turned up and a fresh fire popping in the grate, should have been cozy and secure, but Jenny sat nervously on the sofa, opposite Gran’s chair, and folded her hands. “I feel the way I do at home when we tell ghost stories,” she said as her grandmother eased herself down and laid the crutch on the floor.

  “Well,” said Gran, lifting her eyebrows, “in a way that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, though,” said Jenny. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gran. “I didn’t when I was your age, but now…Geneva, you see that the sign has come, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Jenny, “but…”

  “I know,” said Gran. “You believe it’s accidental. Well, perhaps you’re right, perhaps not. Nevertheless, the head from the Amaryllis has come home after thirty years, and it lies here on this table, in plain sight. And there’s something more about it you didn’t notice, being unfamiliar with such things. It’s got no barnacles on it, and no signs of rotting. Keep that in mind, Geneva, while I talk.”

  She settled her ankle more comfortably on the hassock and leaned back. “Do you remember that I told you about Nicholas Irving, and how he drowned himself not long after the Amaryllis sank?”

  “Yes,” said Jenny. “Because of that woman who was here.”

  “Isabel Cooper,” said Gran. “Yes. Because at first she pretended to be fond of him, but then, later, she laughed at him to his face, laughed at his work and at his love for her. We thought at first, when he disappeared, that he’d gone away—inland, perhaps, or down the coast. It wasn’t until two days later that his dinghy was found, washed up. Without him in it. Still, some people thought it had drifted loose by itself and that Nicholas was holed up somewhere, licking his wounds. But he didn’t come back, and at last some of his friends went to his workshop to see if he’d left any messages or clues. They found all his tools lying about, and another figurehead for some other ship, only half finished. His clothes were there, food stores, everything. And the marble statue he’d been working on, it was still there, too, but it looked as if he’d tried to smash it. It was all chipped and scarred with chisel marks.” She sighed. “He was…temperamental. Another man might have squared his shoulders and gone ahead with his life in spite of being unlucky in love, but not Nicholas. He was completely addled over Isabel.”

  “Well,” said Jenny, “I guess she was very pretty.”<
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  “Yes, she was,” Gran returned, “but Nicholas should have known that wasn’t much all by itself. ‘Pretty’ doesn’t mean ‘good,’ you know, Geneva. Real life isn’t like fairy tales. ‘Pretty’ simply means that by accident you’ve got things arranged on your outside in an extra-pleasing manner. It doesn’t tell a thing about your inside. Still, Nicholas was temperamental, as I said, notional, the way they say all artists are, and beauty was important to him. But we were very fond of him. He came here often. He was almost ten years older than your father, but he was rather like a son to us, and sometimes when your grandfather was off on a voyage, he’d come and read to George and me, or take a hand of whist. He was a good boy, and very, very gifted.” She sighed again, remembering, and shook her head. “His friends found a note in his workshop. It said, ‘I can’t go on. Look for me in the sea.’ ”

  “That’s sad!” said Jenny, much moved by this romantic tale.

  “It’s absurd,” Gran contradicted severely. “A terrible, terrible waste, and all for nothing.”

  “Still,” said Jenny dreamily, liking the story anyway, “I feel sorry for him.”

  “It’s not a happy story, certainly,” said Gran, the hardness of her tone melting away. “A month or two after his disappearance—his drowning—whatever—one night when I was walking on the beach—remember, I was newly widowed then, and half crazy with it, heaven help me—I was walking on the beach, it was one of those nights when the moon is very bright, and I was wandering along, worried about George, who’d gone away to Springfield to live with your Great-aunt Jane, and I was longing for something from the Amaryllis, thinking about the sinking, trying to figure it out, when all at once I noticed a man coming toward me. He looked familiar, somehow, his clothes and his way of walking, and I cried out, ‘Nicholas!’ And it was Nicholas, but he was different.”

  “Different how?” asked Jenny, fearful again of the reply.

  “It was his eyes, mostly. They didn’t have that fiery light in them any more,” said Gran. “They were quiet. And he had a beard, too. He tried to ignore me, to go on past me, but I spoke to him again, and he stopped and said, as if he were a stranger, ‘Not Nicholas, ma’am. My name is Seward.’ ”

  “Seward!” Jenny exclaimed.

  “Yes,” said Gran. “And for a moment I thought I’d made a mistake. But he raised his hand up to his beard and I saw the scar on his thumb where his chisel had slipped once long before when he was working. No, it was Nicholas, all right, and I said so. So we walked together and he told me…”

  “What?” Jenny urged.

  “Geneva, you may believe it or not, just as you choose. I believed it, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. He told me he’d rowed the dinghy out, far out to sea, the night of the day that Isabel laughed at him. And he stowed the oars, stood up, and flung himself overboard. He was so determined to drown that when he sank he opened his mouth and tried to breathe the water into his lungs, but in the next moment he came to the surface again and began to choke. In that moment he forgot about Isabel and wanted to stay alive after all, so he looked around for the dinghy, but it was gone.”

  “Gone?” said Jenny, breathless. “You mean, disappeared?”

  “So he told me,” said Gran. “He began trying to swim, but found that he couldn’t, somehow, and instead he sank again and kept on sinking, in spite of kicking and trying to come back up. He described the water to me as voices, talking to him, pulling him down and down. And all he could think of was how much he didn’t want to drown. He tried to speak to the voices, and found that he could, and he argued with them all the way to the bottom. Yes. He went all the way to the bottom. And he told me, Geneva, that when he got to the bottom, he saw the Amaryllis.”

  “Oh, Gran!” said Jenny, forgetting for the moment that she was supposed to be making up her mind about all this.

  “Yes,” said Gran. “It was the Amaryllis, and it was moving over the sea bottom. Its lamps were lit and there were men working on the deck, though he told me he was too far away to see who they were.”

  “But how did he know it was the Amaryllis, if he was so far away?” asked Jenny.

  “Why,” said Gran, “he recognized the figurehead. There was light, he told me, coming from the face, from the eyes, and he recognized it, even through the blur of water. And all the time the voices kept talking to him and he kept arguing, saying he didn’t want to stay down there, and at last it seemed as if a bargain had been struck, and the next thing he knew, he was lying on the beach in the dark, and he was completely dry. As if he’d never been in the water at all. And he told me that he knew he wasn’t Nicholas Irving any more, but someone—something—else; that he would be called Seward now because it meant ‘guardian of the sea.’ And he realized that he’d promised, in exchange for being returned, to walk along the beaches and give back to the sea anything that it valued—that was the word, ‘valued’—that had somehow been washed ashore. And that if he didn’t keep his promise, he’d be brought back down to the bottom of the sea again and kept there.”

  “Drowned after all,” said Jenny.

  “Yes,” said Gran. “Drowned after all. And then he told me that he knew, as clearly as if he’d been told—in fact, he believed he had been told—that your grandfather wanted more than anything else to send a sign to me—that his desire was very strong—and that he, Seward, would have to watch and make sure that, if a sign was sent, it was something I’d be allowed to keep.”

  Jenny frowned, trying to picture the scene underwater. “He really saw the ship on the bottom,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Gran. “Sailing. Keeping watch. The sea bottom was covered with treasure, he told me, and there were lots of wrecked ships, too, great ruined hulls, lying down there forsaken, full of holes and rotting away. But the Amaryllis, and all the ships with figureheads, are kept whole and clean, he said, to sail on the bottom and guard the treasure.”

  All at once Jenny could not accept the story. Springfield asserted itself, and she said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. It’s crazy. That man—Seward, or whoever he is—he must have dreamed it.”

  “Very well,” said Gran calmly. “There’s one last piece to the story. As we stood there on the sand in the moonlight, talking, two of your grandfather’s friends came down from the grass above us. One of them took my arm and said, ‘Geneva, come back with us. We’ve been looking for you. You know the Captain wouldn’t want you to wander out here night after night all by yourself.’ And I turned around to them and I said, ‘But I’m not by myself,’ and they said, in this pitying sort of way, ‘Come with us now. You must try to get hold of yourself.’ I turned back, and Seward had walked away, on down the beach. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to stay here and talk to Nicholas,’ and I called to him to come back. And one of the men said, ‘Geneva, please, there’s no one there.’ ”

  “You mean they didn’t see him?” said Jenny.

  “No,” said Gran, “they didn’t see him. But I couldn’t see him, either, very well, by that time, he’d gone so far. So I thought, well, perhaps they just hadn’t noticed him, so I pointed to the row of footprints he’d made as he walked away. They were very clear in the moonlight. And I said, ‘Look. See the footprints? I haven’t been alone. It was Nicholas, and we’ve been walking.’ And then one of the men put his arm around me and said, ‘Geneva, you’re exhausted and you’re making yourself sick. There aren’t any footprints there.’ ”

  “But, Gran!” Jenny began, eyes wide.

  “Wait,” Gran interrupted. “Seward—or Nicholas—has been walking this beach for thirty years, and no one’s ever seen him but me. Him or his footprints. Not then, on that night, or at any time thereafter.”

  They sat staring at each other in silence. At last Jenny said, “But, Gran, I saw him—and I saw his footprints, too.”

  “Yes, child,” said Gran. “You did.”

  Later Jenny lay in bed, eyes wide and staring into the dark.
She kept thinking about Seward, but she did not want to think about him. If the rain would only stop, if the sun would shine tomorrow, everything would seem a great deal more reasonable. This place, this house—she saw more clearly than ever, now, that it stood at the edge of another world, at the edge where the things she understood and the things beyond her understanding began to merge and blur. That other world—it brought on transformations, and its blurring edge was marked by the hemline of the sea.

  Still, even the sea seemed simple in the sunshine. Funny how clear, bright daylight made you laugh at phantoms. They vanished, fled away like smoke, under the sun’s round, candid eye. Yes, that was the thing: sunshine to light the corners.

  But there was no sunshine next morning. The rain had stopped at last, but the sky was still hung with gray, against which new humps of vapor hurried by, changing their shapes and rolling as they went. After breakfast, Gran turned the pages of the almanac and read, aloud:

  Final days of August

  Usher in September.

  Autumn equinox ahead—

  Stormy seas. Remember.

  “Stormy seas!” said Jenny, discouraged. “Does that mean it’s going to rain again?”

  “It’s coming into that time of year, Geneva,” said Gran. “Always bad weather at the equinox. Is it getting on your nerves?”

  “A little,” said Jenny.

  “I know,” said Gran. “Moss in the bones. Still, I like it, somehow.”

  “Better than when the sun is out?”

  “Yes, I really do. It’s much more interesting, I’ve always thought. Come, let’s bake a cake. That should cheer you up.”

  Jenny cracked the eggs—twelve of them, a whole dozen days of labor for some unknown, dedicated hen—and beat their slippery whites into a rigid cloud of foam. She had beaten egg whites often before, but now she saw the process as yet another transformation. She sifted the flour, measured the sugar, watched as Gran folded everything into a batter smooth and pale as thickened cream. Transformations again. And the humble dailiness of these activities only increased the knowledge that, at some undetermined point, her world had slid away a final barrier and allowed that other world to merge with it at last, like the fog moving in from nowhere, into the air she breathed, changing its flavor, giving it a richness it had not had before. Like the scent of the angel-food cake drifting out from the oven to fill the house with promises. Like the head on the parlor table.