The Marie-Therese

Clara Haworth was no better than she had to be. It isn’t ill-natured of me to say so. Everyone in Williamsport knew it when she was alive, and there is no one left now to be hurt by the words. I’ve never been easy in my mind since Clara died, and now the doctor tells me it’s time to get my affairs in order, so I’m going to write down the plain truth and have it off my conscience once and for all – the one thing I’ve done in my eighty-five years that I’m truly ashamed of.

Clara and I were born two weeks apart in the winter of 1890, she the only daughter of the shipyard owner here in Williamsport and I the youngest of the Presbyterian minister’s brood. There isn’t much left here now but old people and their memories, but then…oh, this was a thriving little place then, and Clara’s father was the richest man in it, with some of the biggest ships of the day being built in his yard. They’d be launched at high tide into the Midas Basin, with the whole village watching from the beach. Those ships linked us to places we could only dream about. We had the train then, too, with a wye right at the end of the wharf for it to turn on, and the Galbreth Inn on the point where rich Americans would come on holidays every summer. It was a wonderful place to be young, with beach parties in the summer and card parties and skating frolics in the winter and…there now, I’m rambling again, but if I could have chosen I can’t think of a place I’d rather have been born.

It wasn’t Clara’s fault that she grew up a big fish in a little pond. Her father spoiled her, and her mother was a wisp of a woman who should never have had children. She never had much spunk to start with, and what she had was crushed out of her by childbirth and living with Paul Haworth. He was a gentleman, so-called, and never raised a hand to anyone, but he found ways to make people pay if they displeased him, that was for sure and certain – excepting his daughter. She was the one soul on earth who could do no wrong in his eyes.

Clara matured early. At fifteen, with her blooming young figure, roses in her dusky cheeks and long nut-brown curls, she was already turning heads and setting tongues wagging. It wasn’t just the boys who dangled after her, either. Older men who should have known better took notice as well, and Clara preferred them. “A man doesn’t have any sense until he’s thirty,” she said once to shock me at a party after she’d been dancing with Charlie Eisnor, a fisherman of thirty-four whose reputation should have kept a young girl a mile off. Clara said things like that to me now and then because she liked to make me uncomfortable, and she knew I’d be too embarrassed to repeat them.

In May of our sixteenth year, a rumor started that Clara had been seen out on the beach late one moonlit night with an unknown man. The court of public opinion convicted Charlie Eisnor, in spite of his angry denials. It made a big enough stir that Father tried to talk to Mr. Haworth, though he knew it would be time and breath wasted. He wasn’t mistaken.

“That girl is headed down the wrong path, and there’s no one to correct her. Her mother has no spine and her father has no eyes where she’s concerned.” As for Clara, she laughed about Father’s visit when I saw her outside the store a few days later.

“Really, Ruth, it was funny. I would have thought Reverend Meade had too much good sense to believe anything Laura King said.”

Most of the girls in Williamsport either fawned on Clara or avoided her. As I did neither and never reacted to her digs, she respected me, though she didn’t like me. She’d have hated me if she knew I felt sorry for her. I thought she must be one of the loneliest people in the world.

“Laura King didn’t say it.” I didn’t know who had – Father wouldn’t say – but whoever it was must have been someone he trusted.

Clara shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t matter to me what a bunch of spiteful old cats think.” She gave me a look that dared me to ask if the rumor were true, if she’d been out on the beach with some man that night, but I didn’t oblige her. Clara might pretend she didn’t care what people thought, but she wasn’t a fool.

When I didn’t rise to her bait, she marched off smiling. I never saw her alive again. At low tide the next morning, Henry Porter went to check his mackerel nets and found Clara Haworth’s drowned body tangled in the mesh. He came to the manse with the news first.

“I didn’t touch her, Reverend Meade. I couldn’t. I should have cut her down, but I couldn’t,” poor Henry gasped out between breaths. He’d run up from the beach as fast as his seventy-year-old legs could take him. It was a mercy he didn’t drop dead himself.

Father turned whiter than I’d ever seen him, even when the news came that my oldest brother Allan had been killed by a rogue horse out West. Nothing like this had happened in Williamsport for as long as anyone could remember.

Of course there was an investigation, beginning with an autopsy. The results set the village on its ear.

Clara had died pregnant.

Mrs. Haworth’s weak heart failed at the news. Two weeks after Clara’s funeral, her mother lay beside her under the maples in our old churchyard. After hearing an abundance of idle speculation, surmise and downright malicious gossip, the police investigation ruled Clara’s death suicide. Paul Haworth sold the shipyard and moved back to his boyhood home in Boston. Life in Williamsport slipped back into its old, quiet rhythm.

That fall, I started working in the store. I walked home each evening along the road by the beach, and a lovely walk it was, though I never did it without a passing thought of Clara.

On my way back to the manse one fine, still, moonless November night, I turned off the road and walked out to the end of the wharf, drawn by the sheer loveliness of starlight mirrored in the placid water of the Basin. The tide was high, and the air carried the tang of salt mingled with the sweetness of drying beach grass. The reflections of familiar fishing boats cut across the star-glow, adding to the enchantment. I stood there, thinking of nothing but the beauty around me, until a brighter light caught my eye, about a quarter of a mile from shore and moving closer.
Soon I made out the shape of mackerel boat, with slack sails billowing in the slight breeze. The light came from the lantern hung at her bow. It bobbed gently as the boat angled toward me over the slight swell, faster than the mere breath of wind should have brought her. A little nearer and I could read the name on her side.

Marie-Therese. I’d seen her often enough. She belonged to Joel Graham, a young man from Cumberland County on the opposite side of the Basin. He’d fished from Williamsport through the summer, and attended our church on the weekends he didn’t sail home. With his snapping dark eyes, handsome face and easy laughter, a young girl wasn’t likely to forget him. He’d named the boat for his mother, a French girl from down Yarmouth way. But Joel had made it known that when the fishing season ended, he was going to work in his father’s lumber camp. The Marie-Therese should have been pulled up for the winter.

Where was she getting her speed? And where was Joel? Not on deck, as far as I could see. Though I knew I should be on my way, I watched and wondered until, just when I was sure she’d have to crash into the wharf, the Marie-Therese simply vanished.

I stood rooted in place, looking at empty water for as far as I could see. I’d read her name as clear as clear in the light of that lantern, and now…nothing. I heard my father’s voice in my head, as stern as he’d sounded when I was six and had carried home some lurid tale from school.

“Ruth, there are no such things as ghosts. Don’t listen to such foolishness, and don’t repeat it.”

Well, I had no intention of repeating this. I hurried home and kept silent. Over the next two weeks, I convinced myself that I’d imagined the whole thing.

The nights grew sharp and cold as the moon waxed. Walking home again under its light, I was hurrying past the beach when an odd flickering on the water caught my eye.

A lantern. Not caring if I were seen, I watched the same dark shape moving swiftly to shore. This time the Marie-Therese docked, as lightly as a feather in spire of her speed. More – the moonlight showed me a barefoot figure in a dark dress hurrying along the beach toward the wharf. I knew that figure as well as I knew my own.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Clara.” As the sound of my shocked whisper died away, so did the vision. I sank down in the grass at the side of the road, heedless of frosted grass and half-frozen mud.

“Clara and Joel. Who will ever believe me?”

I couldn’t doubt what I’d seen this time, but neither could I accuse a man on such evidence. Besides, nothing was certain. If Clara had been with one man, she might well have been with others. I picked myself up and ran home, concocted a story to explain my muddy dress and went to bed.

I didn’t expect to sleep, but I did, almost immediately. Dreaming, I stood on the moonlit beach as, in her gray drugget dress with her hair loose around her shoulders, Clara ran towards the Marie-Therese. Joel came over the side to meet her, a tall figure I knew as well as Clara’s. I’ll confess I’d spent far too much time watching him in church over the summer, though he never noticed my existence.

“Clara, this isn’t wise. If we do this once too often, we’ll be seen.”

“I don’t care.” I knew that sharp, angry tone well. “I have something important to tell you.”

Joel took her hands in his, smiling. “With a woman it’s always important. Well, tell me, then.”

“Fine.” Clara pulled her hands away and looked him in the eye. “I’m carrying your baby. What are you going to do about it?”

Joel hesitated for just a moment before he took her in his arms. Was that when he made his decision? I’ll never know.

“Do? Why, marry you, of course. Come on board. We’ll be over home by morning. We can see Reverend Driscoll first thing, then I’ll take you home.”

“But your parents…”

“Will get over it. They’ll come to love you. Come aboard, Clara, we’ve no time to waste.”

She did. The Marie-Therese put out into the basin. As she slipped out of sight, I woke and sat bolt upright, shaking.

Murder. As cold-blooded as any ever committed. Somewhere in the middle of the Basin, the man she’d trusted must have put Clara overboard. And I couldn’t tell a soul.

I kept my secret through the winter. It weighed on me so heavily that in the spring my parents started talking of tonics and doctors, but then the word came that Joel Graham had been killed by a falling tree at his father’s camp.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” But I’ve always felt that I failed to tell the truth. So I’m telling it now.


WORD COUNT: 2009