Dolores Claiborne(47)

Saturday - the twentieth of July, 1963 - come up hot n muggy n cloudy. The radio said there most likely wouldn't be any rain after all, unless it was just a few thundershowers late in the evenin, but the clouds were gonna hang around most of the day, and chances of the coastal communities actually seem the eclipse were no better'n fifty-fifty.

It felt like a big weight had slipped off my shoulders just the same, and when I went off to Vera's to help serve the big brunch buffet she had planned, my mind was calm and my worries behind me. It didn't matter that it was cloudy, you see; it wouldn't even matter if it showered off n on. As long as it didn't pour, the hotel-people would be up on the roof and Vera's people would be out on the reach, all of em hopin there'd be just enough of a break in the cloud-cover to let em get a look at what wasn't gonna happen again in their lifetimes . . . not in Maine, anyhow. Hope's a powerful force in human nature, you know - no one knows that better'n me.

As I remember, Vera ended up havin eighteen house guests that Friday night, but there were even more at the Saturday-mornin buffet - thirty or forty, I'd say. The rest of the people who'd be goin with her on the boat (and they were island folk for the most part, not from away) would start gatherin at the town dock around one o'clock, and the old Princess was due to set off around two. By the time the eclipse actually began - four-thirty or so - the first two or three kegs of beer'd probably be empty.

I expected to find Vera all nerved up and ready to fly out of her own skin, but I sometimes think she made a damn career outta surprisin me. She was wearin a billowy red-n-white thing that looked more like a cape than a dress - a caftan, I think they're called - and she'd pulled her hair back in a simple hosstail that was a long way from the fifty-buck hairdos she usually sported in those days.

She went around and around the long buffet table that was set up on the back lawn near the rose garden, visitin and laughin with all her friends -most of em from Baltimore, judgin by the look n sound - but she was different that day than she had been durin the week leadin up to the eclipse. Remember me tellin you how she went zoomin back n forth like a jet plane? On the day of the eclipse, she was more like a butterfly visitin among a lot of plants, and her laugh wasn't so shrill or loud.

She seen me bringin out a tray of scrambled eggs n hurried over to give me some instructions, but she didn't walk like she had been walkin the last few days - like she really wanted to be runnin - and the smile stayed on her face. I thought, She's happy -that's all it is. She's accepted that her kids aren't comm and has decided she can be happy just the same. And that was all . . . unless you knew her, and knew how rare a thing it was for Vera Donovan to be happy. Tell you somethin, Andy - I knew her another thirty years, almost, but I don't think I ever saw her really happy again. Content, yes, and resigned, but happy? Radiant n happy, like a butterfly wanderin a field of flowers on a hot summer afternoon? I don't think so.

'Dolores!' she says. 'Dolores Claiborne!' It never occurred to me until a lot later that she'd called me by my maiden name, even though Joe was still alive n well that morning, and she never had before. When it did occur to me I shivered all over, the way you're s'posed to do when a goose walks acrost the place where you'll be buried someday.

'Mornin, Vera,' I said back. 'I'm sorry the day's so gray.'

She glanced up at the sky, which was hung with low, humid summer clouds, then smiled. 'The sun will be out by three o'clock,' she says.

'You make it sound like you put in a work-order for it,' I says.

I was only teasin, accourse, but she gave me a serious little nod and said, 'Yes - that's just what I did. Now run into the kitchen, Dolores, and see why that stupid caterer hasn't brought out a fresh pot of coffee yet.'

I set out to do as she ast, but before I got more'n four steps toward the kitchen door, she called after me just like she'd done two days before, when she told me that sometimes a woman has to be a bitch to survive. I turned around with the idear in my head that she was gonna tell me that same thing all over again. She didn't though. She was standin there in her pretty red-n-white tent-dress, with her hands on her hips n that hosstail lyin over one shoulder, lookin not a year over twenty-one in that white mornin light.

'Sunshine by three, Dolores!' she says. 'See if I'm not right!'

The buffet was over by eleven, and me n the girls had the kitchen to ourselves by noon, the caterer and his people havin moved on down to the Island Princess to start gettin ready for Act Two. Vera herself left fairly late, around twelve-fifteen, drivin the last three or four of her comp'ny down to the dock herself in the old Ford Ranch Wagon she kep on the island. I stuck with the warshin-up until one o'clock or so, then told Gail Lavesque, who was more or less my second in command that day, that I felt a little headachey n sick to my stomach, and I was gonna go on home now that the worst of the mess was ridded up. On my way out, Karen Jolander gave me a hug and thanked me. She was cryin again, too. I swan to goodness, that girl never stopped leakin around the eyes all the years I knew her.

'I don't know who's been talkin to you, Karen,' I said, 'but you don't have nothing to thank me for -I didn't do a single solitary thing.'

'No one's said a word to me,' she says, 'but I know it was you, Missus St George. No one else'd dare speak up to the old dragon.'