Читать книгу Every Past Thing - Pamela Thompson - Страница 9

In her green book, Mary could tell the story herself, but for now she is only a woman walking. There is always a woman. And a man. Treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. These lines of Emerson’s come to her. A kind of curse, she thinks, to move through the world with so many words strung together. She could spend a lifetime unraveling and tying on a warp of another’s scraps, never to arrive at her own weaving. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Emerson again. Indeed: Why not?

Samuel was right. He is right about her always.

He exposes her. Her pretense that she belongs on First Avenue, that her errand is ordinary and no reckoning, that the weight of her carpetbag is only domestic: coin for meat and fabric she has brought out to match in a shop on Rivington, and not a book, whose pages, were she to fill them, would tell—that, she is not prepared to say.

So far she has spent her days in New York walking (and making whip-snaps, of course; they’d brought the machine with them; they needed some income; they could not let Samuel provide all), from east to west and back until she had lost track of logic amid the crooked streets of lower Manhattan. She sees with certainty now how impossible her task. Even if she were to walk every street of Manhattan, doing so would not yield up every resident. Anyone who didn’t wish to be found would stay hidden. And to be honest, some small relief she feels in that. She may just as well stop looking, lean back into the plump, goose-down pillow of Chance. Goosey goosey gander, where shall I wander? she mocks herself. Chance at least something she believes in. Accept whatsoever befalls. Emerson.

But she cannot—quite.

It was as if Samuel had been looking in her window as she’d packed and not only had seen how she’d wrapped the green book in her nightgown and tucked it at the bottom of her bag but had surmised from that her every thought—and laughed. With Samuel, that danger existed. That he might dump the things he knew of her through the sieve of his mockery, and then show her—how thin the water that runs through, how ordinary the soil caught in the screen. Why indeed write in notebooks at all? Trying to extricate meaning from day, when the days were all—marching single in an endless file. She is easy prey. For him, at least.

“Still the same girl,” he had whispered to her as she and Edwin were leaving after dinner. And she—she could not say that by her experience, she should have earned more respect than he showed her. Instead she was left speechless, or rather, speechless-feeling (for hadn’t she said something?). She was the same, after all; with that she could not argue. And by that he meant the girl who’d talked with him on Sunday afternoons while his brother sketched by the window. The girl who’d talked of the Stoics, of natural history and the reproduction of worms—of anything. “Edwin acts, while you and I fritter the hours away.” She is the girl who talks with him, instead of filling any notebook. “And what, my dear Mary, do you make of our city?” Always he stakes his claim—“my” Mary, “our” city.

Mary resolves that at the very least—say Samuel what he may—she will be the object of derision to no stranger. She will not ask for directions, or stare as though she is unaccustomed to crowds, or to any sort of chaos, or to the smudgy black of coal dust, as though she has never seen such a fine boot withdraw itself under a cascade of orange silk, or a dead horse stepped over as if an irregular cobblestone, or the boys in their tattered clothes sitting atop cans and crates, staring. Though if anyone cared to watch Mary long enough, he would see the hesitations in her purposeful stride (how easily distracted), the agitated pauses—here adjusting her hat, there unfastening the buttons of her gloves. And how, when she arrives at 51 First Avenue, she tips back her umbrella and looks full on the sky, as though expecting sustenance there.

She offers herself to the steady November rain. Here, thinks Mary. Here is all—and none of it Samuel’s. “You’ll catch death,” her mother would say to her and Lucy when they were young and stayed out in rainstorms or ran barefoot on dares through April snow. Not “You’ll catch pneumonia,” or “That’ll be the death of you,” but “You’ll catch death.”

“So be it,” she whispers aloud, taking in the breadth of gray sky— the finality of the clouds, the inconsequent fringe of building-tops around. Sky, in which the private earth is buried.

Jimmy Roberts must have written her that. Suppose somewhere close by he thinks of her.

Perfectly plausible, she reassures herself, wiping rain from her eyes. Having once loved, do we ever stop? Maybe it was foolishness to call the throbbing in her temple love when she should know better. She is old enough: old enough to know how trouble comes. All naming a bedevilment and surprise. She is always surprised. The lines that have begun to mark her face these last few winters are arches across her forehead: She must have, more than any other impulse, frown, or squint, widened her eyes at the world she sees. Like an animal at the edge of the woods, stilled by a human scent, tail up, ears perked, eyes wide, whites showing. Call it alarm, fright—or wonder: Why not?

Peas inside a pod surprise her. She had not taken the peas off the fence before she and Edwin left for New York. That carelessness born of Samuel’s new wealth. It was no longer necessary. They hung there still for all she knew, many more unharvested than needed for seed alone, their tightly twisted vines inky dark, impenetrable as crabbed handwriting, more tenacious than she’d imagined. She had opened one velvety black pod—idly, a scientist now and not a farmer—while Edwin was hitching the horses, and had been surprised to find inside perfect pale-green peas, unharmed by rot, ready to plant come spring. There, without her vigilance. Unruined by her neglect. Samuel was right: Never had her gardens failed. But for that she was not due praise or blame or remarks on her charm across rivers. No gardener dares predict the harvest. So who is she to venture what is to be found, in the story she has carefully tended for so many years.

Jimmy Roberts could be inside the door, here. Now.

Would he recognize her? And if he did, would he be disappointed to see the difference sixteen years have wrought? Though surely he would at least honor what was. His boyhood would come back to him, and the places he’d left, and in her presence time compress to the thinnest line. His heart would skip and race, too; his head bent with dizziness, he would yank off his gloves from the need to do something—is that too much to imagine? He, too, might walk all the way to Union Square, and back down again nearly to Houston Street, just to screw up his courage to speak.

Mary, he would say.

She shivers at his voice on her name.

Is it really you? he would ask. After all these years?

Jimmy Roberts! she would reply (if words came). Imagine that, she would say, as though such imaginings had never before brought him to her side.

Every Past Thing Becomes Strange. That will be her first sentence in the green book. And then, as she has in her garden journals, she will describe and measure the constant rain of these afternoons she has spent walking alone down every street of lower Manhattan. The wide-ocean feeling at the very tip of the island: From here one can sail around the world. (How she would like to carry that air home with her.) The warmth of this strange November makes people stop to unbutton their coats, and pause to look at one another. With such weather, is any human story surprising?

The rain has drenched her, has caught the curls about her neck and pulled them straight, so that the wet dribbles down her neck, along her spine.

Why, in the middle of such a downpour, does she stand, looking heavenward?

As if—

Beseeching? Praying?

Neither, exactly.

Is it a gesture of relief, then?—like that of a child who, after carefully skirting a series of puddles, finally jumps in, trouble be damned.

Maybe. Yet what of the aspect of grief?

As she stands and looks up at the sky, Jimmy Roberts watches her. He must be. If he would be surprised to find her in his neighborhood, at least he would not find the extravagant gesture unfamiliar. That is the Mary I know, he would think, watching her drop her umbrella and turn her face to the sky. Were I to go close enough, she would let me pull a loose thread and unravel secrets and true things, not anything waste, not anything that would let me forget what I belong to (the sky, its fragments of star, the earth below). She might tell me about her girlhood game of grabbing bees in her fist to see how long she could hold them before they stung, or about collecting from the edge of the woods fiddlehead ferns before their unfurling, or about the Spanish singer whose picture her mother kept glued to the inside of her drawer of petticoats and stockings, or that grief and ecstasy are the same in time. And the things she says shift inside and remind him of the great sculptor he once watched work. Of the sharp metallic sound of his chisel and its stop at a tiny chunk of marble spinning off across the floor. She’d cared about what she let drop no more than the sculptor noticed those pebbles whizzing by him, and the commotion, all the visitors, all around.

Did she really share that same spirit, the same concentration, that same gathering in the center as Rodin? Jimmy Roberts had told her that. A silly thing to say.

Say that Jimmy Roberts was just a city dweller romanticizing Nature and one of her daughters. Say that his love (if that is its name) had not been tested by life. But even here, in gray tangling New York, weather surprises people. Love surprises. Thunderstorms come in November without warning. Here, more than he ever had in the country, Jimmy Roberts notices the people who live in accord with the weather, with rain and thunder, crying with the sky, hearts thudding as if to leap out of their casing. (And so forth, Nature all metaphor we need.) Irony, he thinks, that the inhabitants of those windowless, crowded rooms—that is how the reformers always write of them: thirty people, men women children, packed into one room without even a window—live most in the weather, its heat and its cold. Wet seeps through, spotting mold and drawing lines across the plaster walls, dripping puddles. Nature wins out—whether or not there’s a frame through which to watch it. But there will be time enough for him to tell more of that story, inside with her.

For wouldn’t he open the door and say, Shall we? And wouldn’t there be chairs for them to sit together? And a table for them to lean across? And years or hours for them to talk?

A trickle of rain has slipped all the way down her spine to her waist. She blinks and takes cover, leaning up against the building, under the awning, bending to withdraw a handkerchief from her bag.

Dare she?

It was all very well for Jimmy Roberts, but could she—did women do such things?—walk straight into Justus Schwab’s saloon?

Justus Schwab’s saloon was and was not the place the word suggests— cabbage stew and coffee could be had there, not just drink, and after Justus himself died of the tuberculosis in the winter of 1900, his wife (who, like Emerson, survived the disease that took the beloved) carried on for some years in exactly the same manner, until she and many of their friends grew too old for such work and such play.

This demise was yet in the future when Mary Jane Elmer stood outside in the rain. It was no matter to her that chronicles of the anarchist history of the early twentieth century make no mention of Schwab’s eventual closing, or that the Appleton’s Dictionary of Greater New York Samuel had given her failed to list the place among the city’s eating establishments. Nor that the woman who walked out the door, laughing in a group of men, was Emma Goldman.

Mary saw only a woman like her—simply, plainly dressed. In late 1899, Emma Goldman had still managed to avoid having her photograph in the daily papers, though she had already done enough time at Blackwell’s Island to have begun carrying a good book everywhere, in case the police tried to cart her off again. Didn’t she ask for it, clucked the dailies, saying the things she did? Associating with free lovers and bomb-makers. Still, she had yet to be called the worst names (that boy anarchist had not yet shot President McKinley).

Had Mary known it was Emma Goldman, she’d have looked more closely, because she understood from Jimmy Roberts’s letters that it was she who had inspired him to abandon the life his family had intended for him. (If the abandonment and resolution of one person can ever be laid at the feet of another.)

As it was, Mary noticed a woman laughing. That was enough. More than enough. The woman whose name she did not know gave both permission—proof the establishment fit for a woman—and lure— laughter: laughter! So it was that Mary Jane Elmer (née Ware) entered Justus Schwab’s First Street saloon, shyly.

I’m comfortable here, Jimmy Roberts had written her. It’s become more my place than what’s called my own (I am not of this city’s Four Hundred, whatever else you might say of my pedigree). Talk here with a person from anywhere in the world, Mary. Writers, artists, anarchists—they all make it home.

She heads for a back table, a bit away from the crowd, near a man hidden behind a newspaper. She finds herself expecting Edwin (though he must be at the Academy by now). Here in a place where she very well could find Jimmy Roberts, she can no longer imagine him. He is no longer a boy. Perhaps she would not know him.

The giant red-haired man behind the counter raises his brow. When he sees that she won’t call her order out to him, he comes over to ask what she would like.

She has money. “Get something for yourself, Mary,” Samuel had told her. He probably meant something like one of Alice’s dresses.

“Something warm,” she answers the man, as though his question were a matter too trivial for her, as though she entered such establishments every day.

She withdraws the green notebook from her carpetbag and carefully folds back the first page, pressing it down to reveal the little nubs of Samuel’s red silk that bind the pages, the same color thread as the whip-snaps she’s braided all week. After all these years, the same dye lot. She frowns, surveying the writing inside—entries of years, ending with Effie’s birth—and flips the book over and opens it from the other side. Slowly, deliberately, she writes:

Every Past Thing Becomes Strange.

She has been thinking that ever since the journey from Shelburne to New York, on that enormous train. It was not the first time she had seen one. She’d gone to the station with Edwin and Effie and Maud to pick up or drop off Samuel several times a month. So it wasn’t the only time she’d felt the anticipation, and the rush of air and noise so powerful it obliterated all the nervousness of waiting and replaced it with a pounding audible more in her heart than her ears. A thudding straight through her. But this time it was she and Edwin who stepped aboard. An act tantamount to saying, Yes, I bind myself to this engine and all of its terrible, puffing speed. Yes, I pledge myself to the new century and all strangeness to come.

She had said these things to herself. I am committed to living—she said this, afraid she was courting death. To step on a train! She hadn’t any right to expect to survive that first jolt of speed. We are not particularly designed for velocity. Our pace is that of our own two feet. Even a horse’s trot could make Mary feel she was fooling time, pulling a sly trick on Mother Nature, who, though generally tolerant of deviance, was nevertheless known to assert her will. Mary might be caught out and punished, like the time her sister Lucy had dared her and she had jumped on Master, no saddle, holding the stallion’s mane and gripping his belly with her knees like a wild boy. This train put even that galloping to shame. The only one of her family who’d ever gone this far south was her father, and he had not come back.

As the train pulled out, a wrenching deep in her belly. Edwin. Husband. He reached out to hold her hand, and she understood then their leaving. Felt the weight that had been pushed aside by packing and ordering and planning.

She studied his hand closely as the train pulled forward out of the station, as if, before turning her face to the window, she had to take the measure of this ground—the long, bony fingers of his capable hands, his eye’s instruments, usually in thrall to his concentrated gaze, but still now, gripping hers.

He has held her hand many times, yet she does not often pause to think of it.

Somewhere in Connecticut, it must have been, she no longer minded the train’s speed. Would the past now seem slow? When they returned home next spring, would she be impatient holding the horse’s reins up in front of his picture wagon, the back full of frames and photographs and crayons and paints?

She nods her thanks to the red-haired man, who smiles at her and makes a teasing gesture of peeking into her notebook—a motion that at once pays her the compliment, I want to know, and at the same time assures that he would never look. She takes a grateful sip of the steaming cider, and then spreads both her hands on the table. How strange they look. This morning at the whip-snap machine, her right hand gripping the black-handled wheel and left the braided whip, her hands had seemed part of his unwieldy invention and not her own body. She watched the two five-fingered instruments—small, they are, and her fingernails never glowed as pink as he had made them in her portrait—one turning the crank, the other moving back and forth, her eye no longer following the three strands becoming one braid. They had been three: Edwin and Mary and Effie. Two strands don’t hold without the third to braid them. No, she chides herself, for harmful metaphor. No. Two strands might very well be plied together; she had done so herself, countless times.

Every Past Thing Becomes Strange. Her sentence has a word for each finger, like Effie’s hand on the keys of their upright piano, reciting the notes as she pressed—C, D, E, F, G—and back down G, F, E, D, C. Cat, Dog, Elephant, Finch, Goat. Goat, Finch, Effie did clap.

Come Down Eddie For Good—Good For Eddie Did Come.

She hopes good will come for him. She is not at all sure what sentence she wants to follow Every Past Thing, so she contemplates her husband. Her mind a hush, a prayer, she thinks, though she has not prayed since the war of her childhood, the War against the South, when her mother had cursed and forsworn any further mention of God. Mary conjures him, Edwin, as she’d once invented God: with a paintbrush in his hand, of course, his fine dark brows slightly furrowed, his dark eyes fixed on something she can’t see. She is interested, suddenly, in this difficulty: how, busy looking so intently at him, she can’t possibly see what he sees; staring can bring her no closer to the mystery he is. He would be interested in a puzzle like that. He would line up his magic glass, to see the world upside down and his own stare given back, all of that at once, in one painting.

After she writes Strange atop a new page, she stops and looks about. She skips several pages—would that be enough room?—and writes Becomes. After delineating this space and thinking for some minutes about Strangeness and Becoming, and what notes she might another day make about both, she turns another leaf. Thing. And adds an S—for wouldn’t that be more fruitful?

Thing(s)—

A business card that says Artist—His.

A Secret—Mine. And one not mine.

Bones—Hers, under the earth, with her woolen blanket embroidered with rosebuds, with Thos. Jefferson’s Black Hollyhock seeds and my mother’s missing serving spoon with the W atop the handle and clumped roots of Black-Eyed Susans performing their underground winter migration. (But not skin. Not lips or eyes. No longer.) Worms crawl, and stop at our New England rocks and bones.

A letter with a postmark August 1883—from an Undergraduate writing silly nursery poems: Mary, Mary, no longer Wary. (I am, tho’, so.)

Blue and ivory eggs in a nest—“Perfection,” agreed Edwin and Samuel. And they set out to plumb the mysteries of an egg: the one brother to measure and sketch, the other to describe. (Or entertain, in the event that Perfection proved unattainable.)

Stones—tho’ not the gray misshapen monstrosities I stacked to the left of my garden (forgive me if I want something more beautiful than that). Maybe river stones, made round and smooth by water’s Constancy. Each perfect as an egg. Effie used to collect them. Those with stripes down their center and those of deep color, all ovaled and polished to the touch, she named magic. Rough-edged rocks, with flecks of mica, “civilized magic.” When I asked her what she meant, she said, “You know, Mama, not so much. They don’t have the singing.” Where on Earth did she learn a word like Civilized, and to put song outside it?

I buried her pouch of magic stones with her.

I can collect more (will chips of cobblestones and other City rocks suffice?) and fashion my own bag. In case I need to drop them one by one behind me.

Wasn’t that the trick, in nursery stories, for those who feared becoming lost? But this method will not do for Mary. Anything draws her interest. Stones. Galaxies—that ours might not be the only civilization in the universe, and the corollary: If our civilization is so small, then what of one person? A speck on the earth. All opinion and desire even less.

One year she and Effie had kept the clippings from their fingernails, to see how such tiny slivers might accumulate (a cubic inch per year? Buried, would they decompose?) Then months went by; they forgot about that experiment. Though still a faint shadow of plans conceived and plans abandoned darkens the sky when she brushes nail clippings off the windowsill. Samuel is right about her. About her fits and starts.

Very well. Mary flips the book back over, and—as if possessed, she thinks—adds dates like things:

1849, 1850 Susan Smith Elmer gives birth to her eleventh and twelfth children: Samuel and Edwin Romanzo

1860 Mary Jane Ware born

1876 Elmer Bros. (with help of Cousin John) finish the Bray Road house

Congressional Committee reopens case of the Andersonville prison. Confederates claim they repeatedly sought release of prisoners and movement of surgeons and medical supplies and were denied by the Union government

This clipped information reminds only her and would not convey to anyone else how those hearings had devastated her. The betrayal: Her father had died at Andersonville, and need not have, she understood in her sixteenth summer. His life—anyone’s life—worth nothing in the war-makers’ strategic equation. She might have written that: 1876 Trust no government. A realization that turned her more impetuous than she’d already been. More likely to climb out her bedroom window to commune in the fields with a man a decade her senior.

1878 Samuel marries Alma Whiting

2 November 1879 Edwin Romanzo Elmer and Mary Jane Ware, Halifax, Vermont

29 June 1880 Effie Lillian born

1882 Alma dies of pneumonia

1883 Summer visitors in the Buckland house

1884 S. buys our interest in Buckland house and moves to Boston. We remain in the house, Maud with us for meals, Samuel home weekends

1885 Edwin’s roof bracket receives patent

Alma’s mother, Sarah Whiting, dies

Maud goes to live with Samuel

1886 E. invents machine for twisting and braiding silk thread into whip-snaps (S’s company manufactures the horse whips; snaps attached at the factory)

For many years, she’d met the train early Monday morning with a package of 150 snaps to send off to the factory in Westfield. Not that she wishes to dwell on this. Enough that Edwin painted her at his invention, a glow round her head, threads flickering through her fingers. She was not like that. Still, the painting deserves a place in her chronology. A Lady of Bishop Corner (Wife of the Artist). Later. When she gets there. After Effie died, must have been, for she’d worn her mourning clothes.

Whip-snaps are not what she wishes to write about. The pages of a history need not be apportioned as the hours spent. Such a book, if hers, would be devoted one-third to sleep (with its dreams, thank goodness), one-third to food (its growing, its preparation), and one-third to fiber (plying, braiding, weaving, knitting, crocheting, sewing, scrubbing, mending). As for all else—human interaction and reading and walking abroad in the world—mere addenda? Jimmy Roberts only a footnote?

No. She wants another sort of history: The book of what was not. An impossible problem. She sees Samuel laughing. Go ahead, Mary Elmer. Write what cannot be written.

In the book of what was not—there she might write of Jimmy Roberts. But if this is the Elmer family history? The years stand in a line, silent accusers: 1887 1888 1889.

How small a date in a book appears. Born four letters same as dies. And born a sound more like dying, a thud on the earth. And dies more alive—the I like fire. One could make quite a bit of nothing. Or nothing of an entire life. Emerson comes to her again: I forgot my morning wishes. Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day turned and departed silent. I, too late—

She is in the afternoon of her life, and evening has always startled and saddened her. She does not know how to write what she wants to say. I, too late—. Jimmy Roberts came one August and took her heart. Nellie’s baby born the same week Ma Whiting died. “You best hold her,” she told Samuel, as she put the bundle that was Gracie in his lap. The closest she’d ever come to giving him a child. The strange ticking of complicity when she galloped off after, down Bray Road into town to tell Dave the news.

No, what little she’d managed to write had hardly anything to do with life as she remembered it, let alone as she’d wished it.

She contemplates the page marked Strange. She has entered the door at 51 First Avenue, she has opened the pages of the green book, and she is none the different. Jimmy Roberts is nowhere to be seen, nor Nellie. And none of this a dream, unless life is.

Look—there Edwin is, crossing the park on his way to the National Academy of Design, with a painting tucked under his arm.

He stops and bends to the ground, gathers a handful of leaves and brings them up to breathe deeply of their damp. And the facts he uses to order his life fall away: Edwin Romanzo Elmer, student of Walter Satterlee, A.N.A. Admitted to all classes of the Academy save one. Born, Ashfield, Massachusetts. Husband, brother. Father, once.

New York has put him strangely in the mood of retrospect. Strange, because so much new assaults his eye. Isn’t that what he wanted, coming here? Retreating into the past now a cowardice he must trounce out of himself. Seeing Samuel last night caused it. And Mary’s set face when they left. And being in a city again (little though New York resembles Cleveland): The movement stirs him, unsettles; his thoughts race. They could go—forward—or back.

The leaves have already frozen and melted, and they fall apart in his hands, their skeletal webs only a clue to their original form, their substance reduced to dark crumbs. But the smell of them—slightly sour?— with something rich and loamy buried beneath their first affront.

His shovel had hit the leaves first, and they were harder to break up than the earth below, which was not yet frozen. (They had been lucky in that.) He and Samuel dug without looking up. Not at the sky, not at each other, not at Mary.

When he left that house, he vowed not to ask anything more of the world. Never again. Having once, at the Cleveland Public Library, immersed himself in the Greeks, he made note of his own hubris, and, chastened, pledged to need nothing at all. (Though he still had Mary.) He was a person who made such vows. He had enough of the old religion to believe absolutely. Never again, he said. And meant it, despite what he’d grown up knowing of the dangers of belief. His own mother had forgiven Pittsfield’s Reverend Miller his first miscalculation and waited on October 22, 1844, for the end of the world on the banks of the Wabash River, his sister Emeline a baby in her arms, while Darwin and the others played in the woods within hollering distance. And the newspaper accounts he’d read of his brother Darwin had blamed his death on a mind “unsettled by the Second Advent fanaticism.” Not to mention Uncle Alfred’s voices. Yet Edwin is capable of conviction—his own, alone, and nobody else’s. He had always ignored the gossip of neighbors. He knew, somewhat foggily, about their head-shaking; he didn’t allow any of it to come into focus. Though about the big house, he’d come to agree: It was an affront to the land. It was simply too tall. The bracketed roof arrogant. Altogether too much striving for effect. A city effect. It fit neither the grandeur of the mountains behind, nor the slow curve of the road uphill, nor the sprawling Whiting farmhouse across the street.

Never again will I ask for anything. He packed one trunk of clothes, paints and brushes, photographs. Put it in the wagon with chairs, his drawing table, her whip-snap machine, enough blankets and dishes for two. Hammered together a box and gave it to her to pack up Effie’s things. And went off down the hill to the center of Shelburne Falls, to settle on a small apartment. No more frescoed walls, no high ceilings, no elaborate moldings, no velvet couches, no tapestries, no billiard room. No orchard with trampled apples underfoot, the brown sweetness everywhere a reminder of ripening and decay.

The house comes to him as a painting already framed, with dark strips of carved walnut splitting the roof from the sky, the house from the orchard, the steps from the grass, the wisteria growing up about the south-facing porch. In the middle, the front door swings open onto a hall and stairs that stretch up alongside a grapevine of a banister. A mad artist’s rendering of Greek columns recedes in the shadows of the hall. He was surely mad. To have built that house. Painted those marble columns. Planted the wisteria. And that wife and that child and that brother perched singing on top of the roof. Instead of making the billiard room off the back hallway, he should have left an empty room for getting down on his knees to thank the stars for such life. For their hearts beating and the birds in the morning. But he does not believe in prayer, or even luck.

In the early morning while Mary and Effie slept, he was always startled by the light. Every morning surprised by how it came around the mountain—Goodnow Hill it was called, though it had enough looming presence to block the light of the rising sun until it was so high in the sky as to be everywhere already.

“Be Goodnow,” Samuel winked at him when he left Monday mornings. “Take care of Alma and Maud for me.”

Be good now. Edwin wonders: When had the tone of that teasing admonition changed? After Alma was gone? Lovely, straight-spined Alma, who saw before anyone else among the village’s founding families the appeal of a man such as Samuel Elmer, and took him by the hand into respectability. And bequeathed him its assets.

No, perhaps Samuel’s tone had always had a trace of mockery, an older-brother edge of superiority, with its suggestion that because Samuel had seen more of the world, it remained for Edwin to be the good one. As if being good were simpler.

Samuel had mocked his youthful infatuation with Effie Ellsler with the same hint of derision. Encouraged him to trade it in for a real woman. (Samuel, as far as he could tell, had already, even then, subscribed to a few of those.) Still, they were both of them the boys who had come home from Cleveland to take care of their parents. Edwin reminds himself of Samuel’s generosity. His encouragement: He had arranged for Edwin to study at the Academy. Yet beneath Samuel’s ostensible willingness, a price. Something Edwin cannot name. And not just a portrait of Alice, though that, he was sure, would do for a start.

The painting under Edwin’s arm bothers him. For this one, he has no excuse. Once, he was not bothered by failure. Didn’t stop long enough to judge himself harshly. Would simply get up again in the morning and start another painting, another money-making endeavor, another building, another invention. But this painting is so bad that the influence of it has carried over into another day. He—stammers to think of it. He is tempted to kick it under bushes at the edge of the park and cover it over with leaves. He’s not signed it. He won’t. Its falseness a poison to him. Yet how could he have done any better? The Academy picks the models. The Academy doles out the assignments. This model was the fashion—and what of it? If, in New York, fashion has greater authority than in the countryside, that is no cause for submission. Why then does he bow to it? Because Samuel has paid for their apartment; because this is his last chance; because Mary is at home making whip-snap after whip-snap. Because, because.

Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! she’d read to him once, after he’d stumbled out of bed and felt his way down the stairs and then to the kitchen door, where she sat, naked, fire burning in the middle of the night. Reading Emerson. Laughing. She thought that was funny. The whole thing: the passage, his squinting at her. She drew comfort from examinations of human foible and weakness; he did not. But perhaps Emerson had it right: The factories of his youth have exhausted his river, and all that’s left to him this trickle.

He does not know how the days passed. Sitting on the steps he and Samuel and Cousin John had put in, he painted in the early dawn while time waited. Nothing else anywhere but the movement of his brush. Until, gradually, their stirring. And then Effie would leap into his arms, bringing back his pulse, and all the seconds ticking away. Mary went on ahead to the kitchen while Effie helped put away his brushes and paints. Then, giddyup! down the stairs on his back. Papa can we grow the same grapes you paint. Papa can we swim today. Papa can I ride Her Excellency. In the kitchen, steam and flame and cornmush and the sweetness of maple sugar and Effie’s chatter and constant movement. The city people not far behind, wanting food and advice.

For many mornings he had painted on the walls of that hallway, rendering a grapevine along the banister and, in the foyer, the marble columns of the ancient world. A fashion, too. Still painting someone else’s world. Yet then his feeling had been so pure! (Hard to imagine, now, with this poison under his arm). Pure or corrupt, no matter: Could he say the painting of his youth was any better than this Arab tucked under his arm? He’d painted quickly then (a facility he’s not lost), wanting to make enough progress to surprise Samuel at the end of the week. The marble columns for him, really. Their grandeur a reminder of the brothers’ shared past. Samuel would see them and think of their time in Cleveland. It wasn’t Paris—but they’d been away. In Cleveland, life had grown larger than chores and turning the day. Silk thread was going to buy them the world, near enough. Spool after spool traded for freedom. For marble, not New England schist. For scholars’ centuries, not a farmer’s seasons.

He had found the figures and sketches of the marble columns in his notebooks when he was packing for New York. A record of the precision with which he’d calculated the growing lengths of each column’s shadow.

After Effie had died, he had fled that house, with those marble columns rising from floor to ceiling, echoing the Corinthian capitals flanking the front door. He had left behind those particular aspirations. That worship of the Greeks—a fashion the other students in his class mocked now. Satterlee himself already a relic to them—and what, then, of his middle-aged apprentice? But was it any different, really, this new obsession with the Orient?

None of this had mattered then. He had simply painted. There had been, then, the promise of time. There had been Effie. Now, of that promise, only his yellowing notebook remains, with its meticulous numbers and measured shadows in fading pencil. And this Arab under his arm. He forgives himself the columns. He had been so young! He forgives himself and Samuel the billiard room, the oyster rooms in town, the house perched too proudly atop the hill, his portrait of the singer Effie Ellsler—all their showy attempts to bring the city home. To prove their difference from their forebears. Nothing to be gained from that. Not where they all are tending.

The picture of Effie Ellsler—his first portrait—still under sheets in the Whiting attic. Then, his youth was excuse enough for its failings (had he, in those days, admitted either youth or failing). But he has no excuse for this painting under his arm. This, the test to be admitted to the Life class. The latest of the week’s three models. The Woman. The Urchin. The Arab. So-called. Misgivings strike him. Something stiff—false—in this practice.

What is this life he has chosen? He—a fifty-year-old man. Probably with more of life behind him than ahead. And he’s now one of a circle of pretentious slicks and—. His mother’s words come to him. Give them the benefit of the doubt. But he is old this morning. Everything irritates. Samuel and his new wife—her smiles, her touch. She’d held his hand until he had felt his palm turn sweaty in hers. Paint’s slow to dry. Skies gray, wet everywhere. And it should be colder. It’s almost as if the seasons are scrambling—as they had when Effie had died, when the rain had melted January’s snow in what should have been its hour of dominion. No, it is not the fault of the other students. He has laughed with them. Shared a drink, once. They are only as young as he and Samuel were, building the house. Already done with Cleveland. Already after first love. They are not so young. It is only that he is old, and he will not see the day—

He has been here before. With cause all the world would grant (their only daughter, dead before her tenth birthday) and none at all. Despondency the same at any age at any place. Worse now. He almost chuckles, to think how bad he feels. Good. Enough light left in him to imagine laughing—if only because now is always the worst and he always the unluckiest.

He had never been convinced that traveling to New York held the promise Mary and Samuel thought. Whatever decision he makes, sadness comes after. To Alaska. To New York. Or taking in his hand the magnifying glass he’d used a hundred times before to inspect the ruffles and wrinkles and eye-sets of the deceased and then turning it upside down in the drinking glass and finding half a tiny world upside down and half a tiny world upright, seeing that and knowing how to paint it, thinking of nothing else until he’d rendered it onto canvas. And then, it was only—a thing done.

“Strange, how absolute the blackness surrounding,” she had said to him.

“Meant it,” he had grumbled.

She hadn’t said she didn’t like it.

But it was strange, probably—and he was strange, to paint that way, with the facts of his life (logs to be stacked, orchard to tend) seen through the window, shrunken and divided in the magnifying glass, which takes up very little of the canvas where it rests in Alma’s glass sugar bowl. Not nearly as much as the expanse of dark around. As if he’d taken it upon himself to embody his father’s monocular vision, with its exacting, compensating stare on the one side and dark on the other.

Neither his father nor he will live to see the day.

He will not live to see the day. He does not know why this phrase comes or what future he mourns. But he is not the only one on whom the calendar weighs: With the century about to turn, all the day’s greatest minds are bent on summation. He’d read last year Albert Michelson’s assessment that most of the grand underlying principles of physical science were firmly established, that further advances were to be sought “chiefly in their rigorous application.” Though he does not recall the exact words, he remembers the sense: Though Michelson had granted the possibility that further marvels were in store—it was good science, to admit the limits of one’s own knowledge—mourning imbued the rest, and was the true spirit, of his remarks. Mourning that only tinkering remained, and not astonishment. The speed of light always the same whether we are coming or going: Michelson himself could not countenance this, even as he proved it so.

Everything had been for Effie. Every word on every page. The house on the hill, its silk damask curtains. The lace collar she’d not had time to finish. Mary cannot believe that she was ever such—a woman with a child growing inside. With milk and not only blood running. Someone with reason to believe in the future and reason to explain the past. Even her handwriting looks oddly rounded now, plump with optimism. Though she must not have felt so at the time, excavating the family troubles. Brother Darwin’s death, Uncle Alfred locked up.

Revelations, she’d quoted for that, as had Alfred himself. The land will be soaked in blood. The children and the rulers and the generals, everyone, slave and free, will scatter and hide in the hills. Hadn’t he been right, in his way, she had wanted to suggest. Thirty years early.

Questions torment her. (Not Edwin, from the look of it.) Uncertainties about—everything. Why for instance words, unless they are for someone? All the earlier pages of the green book had unborn Effie as their audience: With you inside, my Sympathy cannot help but be with young Annie Catlin, whose baby Alfred took from her. Or: Your father emptying Uncle’s bucket and bringing his plate. Four times a day out to the cage (your uncle Samuel paid him to take over his turn). And how is Annie? Uncle Alfred sometimes asked. As tho’ he’d loved her once.

This is the abandoned book she has brought to New York. Perhaps Samuel is right: Completion is not in her nature.

When Edwin returned with the mourning picture, full of the vivid colors of a perfect June day, she thought: Here is our difference. I could never have formed it whole. After all our same years there, I could not have put together even the house. Let alone Effie. Or myself. Or him. When she looked at what he’d painted and tried to see in his eyes where he had learned to do such a thing—what knowledge he harbored—he had turned from her gaze. They were separate, she and Edwin.

She had seen then how her own life, too, would slip away. That she would ever after watch it go. That however many days were left to her on this Earth, she would never quite catch up to them, never embrace them— never even begin to lift her arm to wave good-bye. The shadow of the lilac bushes on her side of the painting blankets her in gloom. How tiny Edwin had made her. Himself, too. The two of them half the size of their own daughter. Right in that, he was: How tall a child grows!—under your very eyes. Big enough to fill the world.

Today’s gray sky and rain the opposite of the clear blue of Edwin’s imagined summer day. They’d never the three of them posed in front of the house like that. Though they’d talked of it, when the Howes brothers passed through town, taking pictures of everyone who could afford the dollar for three prints. Her Totwell cousins won the bean-counting contest and posed for free. But Edwin was opposed to paying someone else to do what he could just as well take care of himself.

She had stopped before writing 1890. But what if she simply wrote: January 1890 The book of no Effie.

Was there no star that could be sent? House and tenant go to ground—

She follows Emerson’s lament for his own young son that far. But she had not any God for comfort, nor conclusion to any verse.

Under Strange, she writes: The last November of the century had a strange heat to it from the start. The past tense, though the month has just begun. The pretense makes her delirious with bravery. The weather was nothing tropical, exactly, but with too much wet for good sense or Capitalists. Not every storm changes the landscape, of course. But tell that to the caterpillar.

She is small, after all. She is three inches high and resides in a single plane. Here is the beginning and the end: a blue sky filled with fractured clouds; the shadow of their lilac bush; red clover and buttercups scattered throughout the lawn; Effie, petting Her Excellency, the oldest sheep. These are the edges of her existence.

Edwin made a box. And she put Effie’s things in it.

She and Edwin sit, in their Sunday-morning best, together. Edwin with the Sunday paper with his beloved weekly math puzzle (of all respondents, only he will answer correctly), she with a fresh ball of pale blue yarn and needles. But not knitting. Staring. Into the eyes of those who will come, who will not know or care who she and Edwin and Effie were.

The house looms behind them, empty. (Was it the painting that made Edwin decide that the scale of the house had been wrong for that curve of land, the pitch of the roof too severe?) Empty, save for a formal arrangement of flowers in the parlor window. The last time she had managed such elegance was in the days of the summer guests. Empty, save the shadow in the upstairs bedroom. For a long time, whenever Edwin left the Shelburne apartment, she would squint into the tiny rectangles he had made of the windows, trying to see into the darkness, trying to understand what he had made there. The shape in Effie’s window reptilian, something creeping and prehistoric. One morning it seemed a giant lizard, devouring its young. And then she did not look again. If one person sees God in the sky and another Storm; what is the use of argument? She will put that, somewhere.

Edwin is near Mary, and near the shadows, but not obscured by them as she is. Energy restrained in the cross of his legs, the sun glinting off his shiny best shoes. It was as if he’d taken Effie’s liveliness into himself— crossed his own legs exactly as she’d crossed hers and stared hard, sassy, right at Mr. J. K. Patch when she’d stood for her studio photograph.

The new Effie is under a summer sky, far away, near almost to stepping out of the painting altogether, and taking Her Excellency with her.

Did he think that he was leading her out of our realm and into another? When he contemplates all those photographs of the Dearly-Departeds and breathes color into their countenances, does he imagine himself Charon, performing a service, ferrying those who’ve been left behind across the River Styx, for a last look?

She does not understand him. When she looks at what he sees—the Dearly-Departeds rendered in albumin and silver, and his hand, dusting them with the color of life and then framing them in somber, funereal black—she cannot imagine how he thinks of them. “A roof and corn-mush,” he said. “Shelter and sustenance.” But she never believed that was all. His close peering at those tiny photographs of the Departeds through his magnifying glass belied such disinterest. No, she knew (if she knew anything of him at all) that he searched for clues, there, in the reproductions. What did you know? she imagines him asking each person.

He painted Effie wearing the lace collar Mary hadn’t had time to finish. Such a thing a luxury, after all. And luxury after everything, even in winter, when time swelled in the long dark evenings around the stove. Luxury after fire and food and socks and comfort when she fell. She had left the crochet hook in the last row when Effie’s fever rose.

He knew that.

If someone had asked her, Does Edwin notice what you’re doing?— she would not have guessed he knew by heart what she was crocheting before she’d even stopped and shaken the lace out and held it high. Yet he had. He’d picked up her last row and bound it off, held it up complete, smoothing it over Effie’s shoulders.

That is her husband. Gone, and then surprising her with observations that only one present could have gleaned. Her powers of observation are not as great, she knows very well, without Samuel’s mocking her. She forgets even Effie. Every day she loses her further, until it seems that only her deep-brown eyes remain, painted in permanent inquiry. She can no longer hear her voice. If she remembers things Effie said—that she called mica “civilized magic” or asked, “If the year zero didn’t begin the world, what happened to people to make them count?”—these words come to her now as something hardened for having been repeated so many times, no longer Effie’s own.

It starts to be as if she never lived. And if Effie, her dearest, whose death she thought she would not survive, had been but a dream, she must be herself something even less. “Come now,” she hears Emeline saying. “You don’t mean that.”

Depend upon it: There are always the Sensibles to comfort the Aggrieved. (She would write that.) She once suspected Emerson’s sincerity about his son Waldo, and longed to surpass the years and miles to bang on his study door and voice her protest. Or was it comfort she wanted to give? (The intertwining of comfort and protest—that may be useful.) He had been left too long alone among his books. Though surely he had Emelines of his own to dust off his desk and dispense the occasional “Nonsense!”

What is Thought, what an Idea, at the family table. (She could start there: all the family at dinner.) If daughters and sons are but dreams, then words less still. Less than dust. Anyone knows that. Emerson, the most dearly beloved professor of her college by the stove, gone from this world longer than Effie. Yet his words seem real inside her: It does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. So he’d said of his son Waldo. (Though Emerson was lucky to have another, and daughters, too.) He grieved that grief could teach him nothing.

Mary, full of admiration, hesitates to argue. She sits, at 51 First Avenue. She has a pen, and a book, whose pages are mostly empty.

Emerson’s great scouring instinct—the vigorous circles of his thought, scrubbing away crust and convention—the light he shines on his own appetites and ways give her a vision. He is a man who found a Method (conversion of thought to object, she names it, her hand on her pen.) If Edwin can bind off the last row of her lace collar, and Emerson get up his old heart again, then why shouldn’t she impart and invest her own ounce? As he puts it.

Here is my Grief, she will write.

And here are its lessons, she would like very much to tell Samuel.

“Sketch quickly,” the drawing instructor says, as he weaves in and out of the row of students’ easels. In front of one; behind the next. Such deliberate pattern amuses him. He holds a chalk in his hand and taps it against his palm as though he is a musical master marking tempo.

“When your time is up,” he tells the class, “commit the Arab to memory.”

Ward the Lesser, the students call him, in unkind comparison to his older brother, the sculptor John Q. A.

“When your time is up,” Edwin mutters. “Sketch quickly”—that’s what he’s done his whole life, so why should he sit in a classroom to be so instructed? The framing for the bay windows drawn in dirt with his foot. First drawings for the Patent Office finished one night while everyone else slept. “The Arab.” Ward’s tone no different than if he’d said “the vase” or “the rose” or any inanimate thing. “Commit to memory.” To the asylum, more like.

Edwin is irrevocably, poisonously, irritable, and though his irritation did not begin in this class, Ward has deepened it, distracted it, blown it up into a bluster of angry confusion. Edwin takes Ward as interlocutor— though he does not want him, does not want his terms, and knows that in accepting them he has lost, whatever argument he makes.

Does he have a name? Edwin thinks to ask. Because he admires the model’s concentration. Especially in such circumstances. For an hour, his hand nestled in his thick beard, holding up his head, he has appeared to think deeply—about—what?

Edwin will never know. The man’s own language must have gestures of title and respect and without knowing even these, without any place to start, Edwin sees very little reason to speak of memory or its committal.

He wants a fight (Samuel would not be so easily pushed to fury). Show us what you can do, Lesser brother.

While Edwin imagines what Ward might do, with paper and chalk and memory, a picture comes to him: He is in the middle of Goodnow stream in the early spring, carefully balanced atop a moss-slicked rock, trying to divert the water’s path with a log. What is he doing there? He does not remember. Memory holds only this: a heavy, man-sized shape of futility, shivering, holding a log at an impossible angle, and the water bubbling on around him, unfatigued. In the picture, his own figure would be secondary to the churn of river. (Men could harness the power of water—he had only to walk down the hill into Shelburne to see that. But that is not what interests him.) Feeding the Trout, he will call it.

“Quickly.” Ward jolts Edwin from his reverie, and he bristles.

If he wants quick, let him go to the photographers. If it’s a race, Edwin would rather bow out now. The drone of his uncle praying comes to him: He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Here, he has come to be an artist. Everything is wrong about the Academy—stale and old and used up. This much he knows. He should not have left home. He should not have come to New York.

But Mary had wanted it. Mary and Samuel both. Though it is no recompense to be near his brother again. Edwin halfheartedly scribbles in the jagged edges around the man’s headband. The cloth has been cut with pinking shears. Must be from a costume shop.

Samuel would be perfectly comfortable with Ward. They would sit together in some paneled clubroom, drinks in hand. Samuel would lean back, stretch his feet out, listen without judgment—he would let Ward be a fool, or not. Under his steady gaze, the shape of Ward’s character would emerge.

That’s not the only place he’s seen her with her clothes off, I’ll warrant, Edwin had heard another student say of Ward and one of the models.

It had startled him.

“Why do you think he keeps having her back? The light’s better in the studio.”

The students laughed, but Edwin did not join them.

He wants to see Ward alone on the world’s most beautiful hill with his paper and chalk. See what he is made of there, under the unforgiving sky.