The black Flemings

by Kathleen Thompson Norris

But a new figure did come, among the many friends and relatives who were always drifting through Wastewater, the figure of a certain handsome, sensible blonde Mrs. Kent, from Montreal, merely visiting Roger on her way back home, and with her, her little daughter Cecily, fresh from a Baltimore school. Cecily had been seventeen then, dark, fragile, flower-like. She was merely a child, going home to her father and little brother and stopping to visit a friend of Mamma’s on the way.

Roger was in the early forties at this time—actually older than Cecily’s mother, whom he had known as a girl, in Boston. But six days after their arrival at Wastewater Cecily ran away with him and they were married.

David remembered all this well, the uproar in the house, Flora’s loud voice, Lily crying loudly, Mrs. Kent fainting and sobbing. Lily and Flora came to their senses because they had no choice, and settled down to keeping house for the white-faced little bride, but Mrs. Kent never forgave her daughter or spoke to her again. It was at about this time that Flora quietly married Will Fleming; married him, David knew now, because she could not marry his brother.

Then came sad, sad years to Wastewater, years that sobered the dashing master of the house for the first time in his life. For it became evident from the first that the new Mrs. Fleming would not bear her title long. The city doctors, one after the other, gave her illness the name of a lingering and incurable malady, but Cecily herself knew, and perhaps Roger knew, that it was youth—youth forced too soon into the realities of loneliness, responsibility, passion, and fear—that was really killing her.

Placid, uncomplaining, sweet, Cecily lay on a couch for months and months, sometimes worse, sometimes so much better that she could walk slowly up and down the garden paths above the sea on Roger’s arm. Aunt Flora, David remembered, had been living in Boston then, where Uncle Will had some temporary position, but Flora came back to Wastewater for the long vacation, bringing with her her own baby, the lovely black-eyed girl that was Sylvia; “even then the little thing was as proud as Lucifer himself!” thought David, reaching this point in his recollections with a smile.

Flora and her tearful little sister Lily and the baby did not go back to Boston in the winter; they would join Will “later on after Cecily’s operation,” they said. And even David knew that “later on” might be only when Cecily was dead. He and Tom went back to school in September, and neither ever saw Cecily again; he and Tom had played late in the clear twilight, along the shore, their new school suits had been laid neatly upon their beds when they came into the close, stuffy house, and their valises packed capably by Aunt Flora.

Cecily had been lying on a big couch by the fire; David sat on a low tuffet beside her and held her hand with all the heartache of an inarticulate fifteen-year-old before a tragedy he may not share. Lily, who had been strangely pretty and gay of late, was at the piano, sometimes singing, sometimes murmuring with Roger, who was leaning above her. Sylvia, three years old, was running back and forth in the pleasant soft light that shimmered with the reflected motion of the sunset on the sea.

That was the last of domestic peace and happiness at Wastewater for a long time. For it was only a week after that that young Tom ran away from school, and Roger was dragged from the bedside of his wife, just facing another operation, to go in search of his boy.

Tom, a sturdy, self-confident boy, now past fourteen, had indeed often threatened this; he was no student; his only books were sea tales; his one thought was of the open sea. He had picked up enough sea talk in Keyport, the straggling village of fishermen’s huts halfway between Crowchester and Wastewater, to pass for a sailor anywhere; he left for his father a smudged and misspelt but unmistakably gay letter, assuring him that he would be back by Christmas, anyway, and love to everybody, and tell Sylvia that he would bring her a doll, maybe from China, and not to worry about him, because——!

Eighteen long years ago now, but they had never seen Tom since. That had been the beginning of Roger’s long cruises, always seeking his son, always returning to Wastewater with the hope of word from him. He had come back that same winter from the first search to find Cecily dying, sinking under heavy narcotics, but knowing that he was there, they thought, and happier when he was beside her. And twice there had been word, a scratched letter from Tom in Pernambuco three years after he went away, and another several years later from Guam. Both contained love, casual greeting; Tom was on an interesting trip now, but immediately after it he was coming home.