Free Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

bags.
    “The back corner, darling, please,” Mother Hannah said, and Peter and his father looked at her.
    “That room is an oven, Ma,” Peter said. “And it’s just got the one twin bed. I thought we’d have my old room.”
    “I know, sweetie, but Micah found dry rot in some of the floorboards in your room this spring, and he wasn’t sure about the weight of two people.”
    Her eyes measured me. I flushed.
    “Besides,” she said, “it has much the prettiest view of the water. And I had Micah bring up the big bed.”
    She dropped her eyes and I flushed again. Peter’s father vanished up a staircase of suicidal steepness and we followed him. I took a great deep breath, partly in relief at being out of her presence at last and partly of pure pleasure at the wonderful smell of old cedar holding the warmth of the day.
    The cottage has never been winterized, so that the exterior shingles of red cedar are also the interior walls, and the rafters and beams are of the same wood, and over the long years it has mellowed to a glorious, dark, fire-shot honey gold.
    “The color,” Amy once said, “of the world’s most beautiful chestnut horse.”
    Our room, at the end of the upstairs central hall, was indeed tiny. The huge white iron bed dominated
    it. It was turned back, so that thin, lovely old white linen sheets showed their cutwork, and it was piled with crisp-slipped goosedown pillows and comforters and a thick orange-and-black Princeton blanket. I smiled, at the great bed and the blanket and at Peter.
    “Old school ties,” I said.
    “There’s one like it on practically every bed in Retreat,”
    Peter said. “It was my grandfather and some of his club members who found this place and established the colony.
    For years afterward they only let in fellow Tigers, and then they started to have their own little tigers—conceived literally under the orange and black, you might say—and one thing led to another, and now Retreat is almost a Princeton alumni colony. You’re going to get sick of ‘Going Back to Old Nas-sau’ pretty soon.”
    “No Yale? No Harvard?”
    “Very few. They go to Northeast Harbor, or Bar, or somewhere. Or buy their own islands. Just Princeton. And virtually all of the Seven Sisters, of course.”
    “Of course,” I said in despair. “Oh, Peter, I’m going to stand out like a sore thumb. No Boston, no New England, no tennis, no sailing, no Seven Sisters. Not even a college degree. Not even a year of college. What am I going to do?”
    “You could always stay in bed and fuck your husband,” he said. “You’d be the envy of every woman from sixteen to ninety. Like I said, nobody does it in Retreat.”
    “Well, how come there’re so many of you?”
    “Oh, we screw at home,” he said. “That’s what those long dark winters are for.”
    I looked at the huge bed. “It’s hard to think about anything else, with that thing looming up like an iceberg,” I said, grinning.
    He laughed. For some reason, there was little mirth in it.
    I looked at him inquiringly.
    “Well, think hard,” he said. “Because it’s apt to be what you do the most of in that bed.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “She’s put us right over her head,” he said. “This room is directly above the big downstairs bedroom they use, and this bed is directly above theirs. You could drop a pin in here, and they’d hear it down there. My old room is at the other end of the house; I’ve actually set off firecrackers in it and no one knew. Unless you like the idea of my mother and father lying there listening to every hump we hump, we’re going to have to come up with something else.”
    “Well, let’s just move back into yours.”
    “Dry rot,” he said, “Remember?”
    “Surely there are other places?”
    “Yep. A nice room directly next to theirs where you can hear even better, and four bunk beds in a room up under the eaves where nobody could breathe from July on, and four hammocks on the upstairs sun