“The egg beater,” Julian repeats.
“He invented the spiral hairpin for women, a curler for our hair. It’s amazing. Shae uses it every night she’s performing. Before you scoff again, he sold this invention for twenty thousand pounds.”
“You’re right, with an egg beater and a hair curler, we’ve got this thing licked.” Twenty grand is a lot of money in 1911. Might as well be a million pounds. Once Julian had money. Forty-one Fabian coins. Even that has been taken from him. Because money can’t buy life. He folds over his knees in the seat.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” He straightens out. “What do Godward and his brilliant egg beaters have to do with your daughter? Is she marrying him?”
“Not him, you fool—you,” Agnes says. “Godward is already married. Not that that has ever stopped her, unfortunately. Godward is leaving behind a wife and ten children and sailing to New York in October. Invercargill is too small for a genius like him. And I want Shae and you to get married and go with him.”
“Shae and I are going to get married.” It’s not a question, or even a declaration. It’s an echo.
“Of course.”
“How does she feel about this?”
“I told you—no one cares how she feels. It’s for her own good.”
“She is going to marry me for her own good,” Julian says slowly.
“Stop repeating what I say. Yes. It’s for her protection.”
Godward sails in October. It’s mid-August now. The trip to New York will take four months. What a planner Agnes is, what a schemer. Julian is about to tell the mother a few things he knows about strategies and marriages and how many times 49 days goes into two months if by land and four if by sea, but he’s interrupted by someone warm and breathy, smelling of many strong things, not all of them unpleasant, who stands behind Julian and Agnes and throws her arms around both their shoulders. The woman’s blonde hair tickles the side of his face.
“Agnes, my love, good morning to you,” says a happy alto voice. “And who is this delectable creature you’ve got sitting by your side?” Julian turns his head to find himself inches away from the vivacious face of a young Maori woman, with bleached hair and bleached eyebrows. Her black eyes blaze, and she is smiling at him with her whole face.
Julian can’t help it. Literally can’t help it. His face loosens from its stone mask, and he smiles back.
“Where did you come from? Never seen you around these parts before. I would’ve noticed, believe me.”
“Another country,” Julian says.
Agnes is much less friendly. “Julian, this is Huhana. She is the granddaughter of the oldest Maori chief over in Bluff. But, girl, don’t interrupt us, we were talking.”
“I thought you came to watch us rehearse?” Huhana comes around and kneels on the seats in front of them. She is covered in skins of outerwear, elk fur, sheepskin, leather. For some reason, Julian suspects she’s got some body under those furs. One by one, the outer skins are discarded. Julian is proven correct. She is large and voluptuous. Her skirt and blouse barely contain her. The front buttons are popping off her shirt; her substantial breasts, tired of being cooped up, demand to be liberated. The smile doesn’t leave the girl’s face. “You’re in our country now,” she says. “How about a hongi?” Her smile is so flirtatious, Julian balks slightly, gets uncomfortable under Agnes’s glare.
“Leave him alone, Huhana,” Agnes says.
“Don’t look so afraid, it’s nothing untoward,” the girl says to Julian. “You have to greet us as one of us. Lean in for a hongi.” Huhana brings her face to Julian’s face and presses her forehead to his forehead and her nose to his nose. “Julian, charmed, I’m sure,” she says, barely pulling away and affecting a posh accent.
“Um, nice to meet you, Huhana,” Julian says, himself barely pulling away.
“Why so formal? My friends call me Hula-Hoop. Or just Hula. Whatever you want.” She smiles. “Whatever you want.”
Julian clears his throat and affects a poker face.
“Come on, say Hula-Hoop,” she says, purring. “Or don’t you want to be my friend?”
“Huhana, I’m serious,” Agnes says. “First of all, Julian is Shae’s friend, not yours. So behave yourself. And second, he and I are discussing matters of great importance. Now go. They’ve been calling your name for twenty minutes. Huhana is playing the self-absorbed, vicious Natasha,” Agnes informs Julian. “Isn’t it time you got going on that?”
Hula manages to simultaneously roll her eyes at Agnes and bat her lashes at Julian. “I’ll be back, I promise.” She winks and thunders down the aisle to the front of the theatre. “All’s well, creatures, I’m here!” she shouts to the other women.
“I can’t stand that girl,” Agnes says.
“Oh? She seems all right to me.” Julian squints toward the stage.
“No, she is a terrible influence on Shae. She’s always dragging her to Bluff or worse to Dunedin, to all them bars and taverns and parties. I don’t think she’s ever met a man with her legs crossed.”
What a gal, thinks Julian.
“Anyway, where were we?” says Agnes.
“You were telling me something about me and your daughter being four months at sea. Are you coming, too?”
Agnes shakes her head. “I can’t leave Kiritopa. And he won’t leave New Zealand. My life is with him. But Shae’s can be anywhere.”
Julian finally speaks truth to power he knows the mother doesn’t want to hear. “You want my advice, Agnes?”
“No.”
“Keep her with you. You’ll be happier. She’ll be happier.” She can’t be any less happy, that’s for sure.
“Absolutely not. Fulani said. She goes with you.”
“The witch knows nothing,” says Julian. “There is nowhere to go.”
“That’s not true!”
“Trust me, it is. Keep her with you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’ll stay with her,” Julian says. “I won’t leave.” I have nowhere to go either.
“She’s not safe here.”
“Agnes, she is not safe anywhere.”
Agnes sucks in her stunned breath. “Wow. Just wow. You better get yourself together, boy. Don’t let me hear you talking like that again.”
“Or what?” Julian says with great indifference.
“She can’t stay here! Lately we’ve all been feeling nothing but foreboding. Even Kiritopa agrees with me, and Shae, too, though she won’t admit it. Now that you’ve finally shown up, at least she’s got a chance. In New York, she can be in a Ziegfeld folly. It’s what she dreams about. Ziegfeld has been producing shows renowned for their style and beauty and humor for over a decade.”
“That is true,” Julian draws out, unsure whether to say the next thing. “Humor being one of the three.”
Agnes squares her shoulders. “Shae can be funny. At the very least, she can act funny.”
“At the very least.”
“She can dance, she can sing. In New York, she’ll be under true bright lights. She has many gifts. You’ll see.”
Many gifts—except the gift of life. He turns his eyes to the stage, where the director is still shouting orders and Shae stands with a copy of the play in her hands.
“It’s what she wants,” Agnes adds, “even if she pretends she wants other things.”
“Like what?”
“Fishermen. Moonshiners. What else is there for her to do around here? Her latest conquest is a polar explorer. Can you imagine? I keep telling her those men are any port in a storm, but does she listen? She says she is one of those ports. She’s got such a fresh mouth; Huhana has ruined her. But it’s just Shae’s way of escaping. She’s suffocating in Invercargill.”
“She seems to be doing all right,” Julian says. “She helps you at the Yarrow, she’s part of the local theatre. She’s got friends, a big city to go to if she gets bored. It’s not a bad wicket.”
“Are y
ou deaf and dumb or are you deliberately misunderstanding me?”
Julian turns to Agnes. “You think you know things? You know nothing. Once I thought I knew things, too. And I knew nothing. But I still know more than you.”
“She can’t stay here, I told you.”
“And I’m telling you that on the other side of this life is a mother who begged to come with me so she could see her kid again—alive—even though the trip would most certainly kill her. But you’re already here. You don’t have to walk barefoot down a river of ice when you’re seventy-five. Your daughter is with you. Stop spinning and toiling. Give yourself what you want most.”
“You know squat about what I want most.”
“Do you think so?” says Julian. “If I am who you say I am, then I know all about your prophecy. Better than you.”
Agnes clenches and unclenches her fists. “I want her to live. That’s all.”
Julian stares at the stage where Shae stands. “She’ll live as long as she’s supposed to. No less.” He blinks. “And no more.”
“The gypsy was clear.”
“The gypsy can’t help you. Hers is not the hand that guides you. She is not the one who sent you here.”
“She is,” Agnes says stubbornly, her body in a tremor.
“Well, she is certainly not the one who sent me here.”
“She is…” Agnes whispers.
Julian can’t make even Agnes understand. He knows both he and the mother must seem crazy to an outsider like Kiritopa and even to Shae herself, scarred as they are with the burns from a half-life of grief that sustains itself and regenerates and never fades.
Fed up with Agnes’s hand-wringing, Julian moves by himself to the front, where he can sit in third row center and watch Shae become Masha in Three Sisters.
Chekhov died recently. In Invercargill, they’re honoring him by performing his bleakest play. Shae has changed herself for the rehearsal. As Julian suspected, her drab tavern outfit is a costume. Here she wears eye makeup and lurid lipstick that makes her plump mouth look indelicate and suggestive. She has put on a fitted skirt, so he can see the outline of her hips, and a cream linen blouse, so he can see the outline of her breasts. She has let down her long dark hair, braiding it into a thick side plait. Her kohl-rimmed eyes are black fire. When she sees him sitting by himself in front of her, she scowls but doesn’t waver. The entire time she speaks, she focuses defiantly on his face.
“Oh, I am wretched,” Shae yells to Julian in the darkened theatre. “I’m almost twenty-seven. I’ve worked for years, and my mind is dried up. I’ve lost weight, lost my breasts”—she cups her breasts—“lost my youth. I’ve never gotten any joy, yet time keeps flying by, and I’m getting farther away from my actual beautiful life, slipping into some kind of an abyss. I’m in despair! How am I still alive, how have I not killed myself, to this day I don’t understand. I thought all I wanted was an adventure, it’s what I dreamed of, but now I know the awful truth. All I ever wanted was to be somebody else’s adventure! I don’t want money, or even fame. I just want to be the kind of somebody for whom another somebody would sail into the Southern Sea, someone who would search behind the sun for me, and who’d say when he found me, you are the one. Masha, Mashenka, my heart, my dearest one, you are the one.”
How does she do it? Julian wipes his eyes. No matter what the life, or how thick the carapace, she manages to find a way to penetrate everything until a harpoon from her soul pierces through his.
∞
After rehearsal, Agnes leaves, and Julian waits for Shae outside in the cold. The Waihopai tributary by the Civic Centre is shallow and narrow, the tide deeply rolled away from the banks. On the exposed silt and sand, squawking white seagulls forage for food on their spindly legs. The wind remains fierce over the gray and sturdy Invercargill, a fishing town which the pragmatic Scots designed and arranged into orderly symmetrical grids. They organized the town and built low-to-the-ground houses out of wood and brick. Most of the streets in Invercargill have either Maori names or bear the names of Scottish rivers.
Shae comes out by herself, covered in fur. Under the elk hood, her hair is still in a braid and kohl remains around her eyes. But the red lipstick has been hastily wiped off, as if the young woman has no interest in subjugating Julian by her most enthralling feature.
“Your mother asked me to escort you back,” he says, staring at the ground. He doesn’t want to be subjugated either.
As they walk, he tries to make conversation, ask some questions. Tersely Shae responds, telling him about Invercargill, a little bit about Bluff, even less about Dunedin. “People travel to the other side of the world to start a new colony,” she says with derision, “and then lack all imagination. Look at the names of the streets. Clyde Dee Tweed Tyne.”
Careful not to ask about Hula-Hoop by name, Julian asks Shae about her friends in Bluff, where Bluff is, and how long it takes a train to get there (thirty minutes). He asks about her mother and about Kiritopa, who has been in their lives since mother and daughter first arrived in Dunedin, when Shae was two. Side by side Agnes and Kiritopa have worked at the Yarrow for almost twenty-five years. They’ve owned it for the last ten. Shae replies to Julian in monosyllables and asks him no questions. He gives up. These days, it’s impossible for him to make small talk.
They walk the rest of the way in silence. It’s not quite spring in Invercargill. It’s just past the dead of winter. At the Yarrow, Agnes has prepared them some food and forces Shae to have her meal at his table. Lunch is a brief and wordless affair, like their two-mile promenade.
Thus begins the inauspicious courtship of Shae and Julian. It doesn’t get better after the first day. In many ways it gets worse. Because eventually Shae speaks. Julian concludes that truculent brusqueness is infinitely preferable. Shae does not use her erotic mouth for good.
If Julian thinks he is reluctant to entertain Agnes’s idea of sailing to the new world as husband and wife, he’s got nothing on Shae. No woman could be less willing to go anywhere with a man than Shae is to go with him, even to walk to the Civic Theatre to rehearse, even to take a train to Bluff to meet her fishermen friends, much less to board a ship to sail ten thousand miles to live with him in New York.
As far as marriage?
“Look, I know Mother told you what she wants,” Shae says to him after a few days pass like this. They’re walking to rehearsal. “Now I’m going to tell you what I want. I’m well aware of the things she’s put into your head. She’s put them into my head, too, and for a lot longer. But I’m not going. Most certainly not with you. She can’t make me. And you can’t make me.” She leaves him with this salvo before she disappears inside the theatre: “She says that if I don’t go with you, I will die. Let me tell you something—I’d rather die.”
She says it as if it’s even a choice.
“Oh, and unless I’m carried into the church in a casket,” she adds, “you can forget about marriage.”
Look at that. Julian has become Lord Falk. I will give my body away to all men, including Lord Falk’s swine herder, if it will stop that wretched man from marrying me.
She turns back to him as she’s about to enter the building. “It’s a long rehearsal today, four hours,” she says gruffly. “Come inside and wait, like she told you. I don’t want to get hit again because you can’t be bothered to stay put.”
He comes inside, he waits. On the way back, before they reach the Yarrow, Shae initiates a conversation of her own. This is what dating sounds like in Invercargill: “You’re silent, ice man, and I’m not a mind-reader so I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I don’t even know if you heard me.”
“Oh, I heard you, all right,” says Julian. “I can hardly help that part, can I?”
“Great. As long as we understand each other, you and I will have no problems.”
“Did I ask you to marry me?” he says.
“Don’t even think of asking me.”
“Did I even think of asking you?”<
br />
She’s friends with people who are trained from birth to be warriors, and it shows. Shae puts up with nothing. Except her mother.
∞
“Has my daughter delighted you yet with the story of her love for the polar explorer?” Agnes says. She doesn’t look impressed with Shae’s romantic escapades.
“I haven’t had the good fortune to be delighted with it, no,” says Julian.
“He’s a good man, likes to drink, likes a jolly crowd, likes women. All women. Besides his wife, that is, who’s back in Britain minding his three children. Shae says he told her he will leave his wife for her. He promised her! Isn’t that bloody hilarious. He was so drunk last year, he nearly missed the Terra Nova’s departure when they were leaving Port Chalmers for the Antarctic. Does that sound to you like he’s a man of his word? The whole region turned out to see them off, and he was under the bed somewhere. And then he was running and fell off the docks into the water! They had to fish him out. Rumors were Robert Scott was so angry, he seriously considered leaving him behind.”
Julian comes out of his apathetic trance. Shae is involved with a man in Robert Scott’s expedition? “What’s his name?” Julian knows a few things about the Terra Nova voyage, unfortunately.
Agnes doesn’t know or doesn’t want to say. “I ask you, will a man like that leave his wife for her after he returns from Antarctica? Have you heard of anything so crazy?”
“I’ve heard a lot of crazy things lately, Agnes,” Julian says. “And it depends what his name is.”
∞
“I overheard Mother talking to you last night,” Shae says to him in the windy morning as they walk to the Civic Theatre. “She doesn’t think he will stay with me, but she doesn’t know him and doesn’t know us. I saw him a few weeks ago. And he promised me he would. Don’t look so shocked.”
“This is not my shocked face,” Julian says. “This is my frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn face.”
“A few weeks ago he returned to Dunedin for me! He sneaked back onto the Terra Nova after wintering at Cape Evans. He wasn’t supposed to do that, he was supposed to stay with his expedition. No one would risk so much unless they were serious about another person. No one could know he was here, and he only did it so we could have a few days together.”
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