The Children's House

by Alice Nelson

  The day she had left New York was icy, the streets swept by river wind, the briny gusts coming at them as they stood on the steps of the brownstone. A crack of light opened the clouds as Ben packed her bag into the trunk of the car. Jacob stamped his feet on the sidewalk, his grey scarf covering his mouth. Marina’s mind was already on the journey, the hours of light she still had left to reach Truro. The map of Massachusetts was spread out on the passenger seat. Ben had highlighted the route in yellow for her, recited all the names of the towns she would pass through on her way to Truro. Bourne, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Eastham, Wellfleet. Villages lined up along the narrow curved arm of the Cape. Grey shingled rooves and the leaking smell of fir. Gizela’s house.

  Jacob and Ben stood side by side on the front steps of the brownstone, something bewildered and bereft in their faces. Marina could still feel the close press of Jacob’s arms around her, the prickle of Ben’s stubble as he kissed her cold cheek. They were what she had to stand against her doubt, her sadness. The throbbing, holy heart of whatever home she had created in the world. She tried to imagine them there in Truro, their voices breaking the bleak, solitary hush of the house, their winter coats hanging on the hooks by the door, their boots warming by the fire.

  She was glad to be alone. After trouble this was always how she felt safest. She had enough food to last for days. Tins of tomatoes, dry pasta. Some fruit, some cheese. When she needed more she could take the car and drive the ten miles to the supermarket in Provincetown. She avoided the small seaside town in the afternoons. The shimmering Christmas lights against the blue dusk and the fast firm steps of couples walking their dogs along the narrow streets seemed unbearably sad to her. The town itself, so quaint and charming when she had visited in summer, had taken on a kind of menace. The clapboard inns with their Christmas wreaths and brass doorbells, the narrow-fronted shops and the lobster restaurants along the boardwalk – all of it seemed cold and turned in on itself.

  The way that the hours drifted made her think of the time after Dov died and Gizela had gone. The months alone in the apartment, the sharp shiver of her grief keeping her awake into the night. Sometimes in the evenings she ran a bath and lay for a long time in the cooling water, the ridge of the tub pressing against her neck, the fire cracking and shifting in the room beyond her. There was no depth to submerge herself in here, no high waterline to hide the body. Her knees were folded to her chest, her mouth resting against the bare flesh of her arm. She blew out the candle that she had placed beside her. Such pure darkness. It seemed then like a comfort to her; the absence of light, the soft dark chill pressed in around the small house. The great vastness of the night.

  Birds, she knew, had a perfect memory. More than memory, perhaps – something so deeply ingrained that it brought them back season after season to the lands they had left. A path in her own memory would always lead her back to the day that Dov had died. She had been the one to identify his body, to say, ‘Yes, this is him.’ She remembered signing her name at the hospital morgue, her hands shaking. It had felt to her that by writing her name, Dov’s death was sealed forever. She had signed him away, cast him into a realm where she could not follow him.

  Leaving the hospital, Marina had taken a wrong turn and walked down a long corridor that stretched between the small wards. Through the open doors she could see patients in their beds, watching television, reading books. A nurse wheeled a dinner trolley down the hall. A woman poured a cup of tea for her mother. Life continued, safe and oblivious. A cup of milky tea, a lighted window, a cool hand against the forehead. It seemed impossible to Marina then that she would ever find any comfort in the world again.

  Four months later, when the school year was over, she had caught a Greyhound bus west to California. She had a scholarship to Berkeley, had sold the apartment on Union Street to the Zelman family. Their oldest son had his own family now and they wanted him to be close to them. Eked out carefully, the money was enough to sustain her throughout her studies and into graduate school. It had occurred to Marina that the apartment was the closest thing she would ever have to a family legacy. It had harboured both Sura and Gizela; made their lives in the city possible. It was the place where she and Dov had grown up. And yet it had not felt like a home. It had housed them, yes, but the four walls had never given any of them refuge. Now the money from the apartment would make another life possible for her.

  It was deliberate, the drawn-out journey across the country to California, through dust-bowls and ancient sea beds, the taut line of the road spinning endlessly out ahead. The hasty meals at truck-stops, the smell of diesel, the cold press of the window on her forehead; she needed a long journey to feel that she was putting enough space between herself and Brooklyn and everything that had happened there. A swift plane ride would not have been sufficient. She barely slept in all those days of driving west, the bus trundling through brief bouts of night-time rain, the lights of towns slipping away into the distance. It was a world in itself, that journey. A book in her hands, a cooling thermos of tea, the other passengers sleeping around her. It felt final; a necessary departure.

  Until she met Jacob nearly a decade later she had never believed that it would be possible for her to return to New York.

  In the mornings the winter tide narrowed the beach to a glistening sliver, a stretch wide enough for a solitary walker. Marina followed the path towards the dunes, her hand above her eyes to shade her face. The morning was pure and airy, a rare blaze of sun touching every cold blade of grass. Further along the shore she saw a figure moving towards her, a man with a pair of binoculars around his neck, a backpack hanging over one shoulder. As he came closer she could see the coarse wool of his sweater, the faded corduroy of his trousers. A tall man with a gingery beard. Patrick Stone. When she had arrived at Gizela’s house several days earlier he had been there to meet her. He was just about to go to Boston for a few days, he said, but would call on her when he returned. There was a bottle of milk left in the refrigerator for her, a loaf of sourdough bread on the kitchen counter. Kneeling down in front of the wood stove that first afternoon, Marina found that a fire had been laid in the grate ready to be lit, the twigs neatly layered over twists of newspaper. At first she thought that Gizela had made this fire, but the date on the newspaper was too recent. It must have been Patrick. When she put the logs on, it had burned long into the night, the glow of the flames reflected in the darkened windows.

  She and Patrick were a few metres away from each other when a flock of small birds rose up suddenly from the dunes, dipping and swinging noisily. A constellation fragmenting and closing in again, shrieking loudly and then disappearing into the freezing air. They stood together in the quiet. The air was very cold, too cold to be outside for much longer.

  ‘It always seems strange to me,’ Patrick said slowly, ‘that a sound like that evaporates.’

  He was looking into her face with a bemused scrutiny. There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, bowing his head, embarrassed. ‘It’s just that you look so very much like her.’

  Marina pulled her coat closer around her. ‘Yes. I always have.’

  Patrick was quiet. He looked at her again, his head tilted to one side. There was something tentative but kind in his expression. Had Gizela loved him, Marina wondered? It seemed impossible to imagine her mother succumbing to anyone. But she must have once loved Yoav. She had married him and lived with him for ten years, however unfathomable the fact of that marriage had always seemed to Marina. Perhaps it was possible for Gizela to love someone else. Marina felt immensely sad, and somehow envious, too. What might this stranger have unlocked in Gizela that her own children could not?

  ‘Stop by for a cup of tea after your walk if you like,’ Patrick said. ‘It can get lonely out here in winter.’

  Marina stared at him. She had seen no one since she had arrived in Truro. She noticed the smear of paint on his green sweater, his fingers winding themselves through the leather straps of his bin
oculars.

  An hour later she walked along the narrow path that led back from the beach towards the two houses, Gizela’s set high above the sea, Patrick’s cabin at the foot of the dunes. They were built with a gracious respect for privacy, she thought, far enough apart to allow for space and silence. She hesitated at the front door. It was the hour of light that felt kindest to her in this place, the dusky early afternoon softness. She stood watching the dune grasses swaying lightly in the wind and wished that Jacob were with her, his hand on her back to steady her. She thought of him sitting in his office in Chelsea, listening to a patient, reaching out for the mug of coffee he had placed on the windowsill. If she took the car right now and drove seven hours south she could be back in New York before he was asleep, could take off her coat and crawl into bed beside him, her cold feet against the familiar, drowsy heat of him.

  Patrick’s house was full of books; they sat stacked haphazardly in piles on the floor and the old velvet couch. A glassed-in porch faced the ocean; there was a desk there with a view out over the dunes to the water. Marina hung her coat on the back of one of the bentwood chairs at the kitchen table. Something about the place appealed to her; its seemingly perilous closeness to the edge of the sea, perhaps.

  He lit the fire, crouching in front of the stove with an old pair of leather bellows. Marina saw how carefully he arranged the kindling, his skilful coaxing of the fire to life. An old tabby cat sat on its haunches near the stove, ducking its head to wash itself. The smell of wood smoke and cedar filled the cabin. On the windowsill was a collection of smooth stones, arranged according to colour and size. The sea was in those stones, Marina thought, and the particular colour of the light here. On the table beside her was a jam jar full of feathers. She reached out and picked up a stippled brown one, holding it to the light.

  ‘Have you ever seen an owl?’ Patrick asked her, closing the door of the wood stove and rising slowly to his feet.

  Marina looked up at him. ‘Yes. In Israel. A long time ago.’

  ‘Ah, an Israeli owl. I was out hunting for owls on the wing today. I haven’t seen an owl all winter. Only this,’ he pointed to the feather in her hands.

  ‘They used to frighten me as a child,’ said Marina. ‘So wild and ruthless. Those strange painted faces.’

  ‘Last year on Christmas Day I saw one up on the spire of the old Methodist Church in town.’

  ‘An observant owl.’

  ‘Yes, seeking atonement for all those mice and rabbits.’

  She watched Patrick fill a teapot from an old kettle. That tipping gesture of his wrist was familiar. She couldn’t remember the person who tilted a kettle like that. Not her mother. Perhaps one of the other women on the kibbutz. Those old days arrived back in the strangest of ways. The high clear air of the desert, the Children’s House with its rows of iron beds, the call of jackals at night across the fields. She wondered how much Patrick knew of her childhood, how much of their lives Gizela had unspooled for him. A bare reckoning, knowing her mother, a few taut details.

  When Marina had first stepped inside Gizela’s house, she walked slowly through the rooms trying to imagine the shape of her mother’s life there. Thick beams held up slanting walls and the roof pitched wildly upwards. The cabin had been built mostly from the salvage of shipwrecks, Patrick had told her when he had let her in. Driftwood lugged back from the beach, planks washed white and smooth. How well he knew the house, Marina had thought, watching him walk down the narrow hall, pointing out a thick beam above a doorway that had come from an old whaling ship wrecked on the beach below. Once it had been the home of a sea captain, Patrick said. A proud old man who had wanted his house to have the echo of a ship at sea, so he could feel that he was still aloft above the waves even when his seafaring days were over.

  The cottage held a sense of absence. It was more than just the quiet of a winter house, the windows glazed with frost. There was so little there. A canister of Earl Grey tea on the kitchen counter, some cans of soup in the tiny pantry, three white mugs on a shelf above the sink. On the wall of the living room hung a small watercolour – a pure blue sky over a field. In a wardrobe in the bedroom beside the kitchen she had found clothes hanging – a black dress with fine white spots, a woollen coat, a linen shirt. Marina had taken each piece of clothing out and held it up to her chin in front of the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. A mirror that must have held her own mother’s reflection. She remembered the day when Gizela asked her to help untangle the brooch from her hair, how she had stood behind her mother at Sura’s old dresser. Both of their faces had been reflected in the glass; for a moment mother and daughter had stared up at their twin images. It had filled Marina with a strange elation –the closeness of her mother, the way that the mirror held their faces. It seemed to her that Gizela was looking at her for the very first time, that her usual abstracted expression was replaced by a quiet consideration of her daughter’s face. How fiercely she had wanted to lean forward and kiss her mother’s cheek. Where does such longing come from, Marina wondered now, staring at herself in the mirror. How do we know to yearn for the things that we have never had? She was not a child who had ever been kissed or held by her mother and yet she had burned so piercingly for one gesture of love – a hand against her cheek, an arm around her shoulder. Even a tender look would have been enough to sustain her. She thought of Dov slipping away from the Children’s House and walking through the night fields to find his mother; of Gabriel and the desperate way he pressed himself into her arms. We long more, not less, Marina thought, for the things that we have never had.

  While Patrick was making the tea, Marina stood up to look at the watercolour. It was a beautiful work, a quiet, contained grace in the lines. Not a seascape, but a field, trees stretching into the distance. It was the same artist, Marina realised, who had painted the work on Gizela’s wall.

  ‘My wife’s,’ Patrick said as they stood looking at the picture together. ‘She lived for forty years by the ocean, but she couldn’t stop painting fields. She grew up in Kentucky.’ He handed Marina her tea, the cup trembling faintly in the saucer as she took it from him. ‘I think the lucky ones are those who belong to the places they are born,’ Patrick said. ‘They don’t have to go searching.’

  Marina was silent. She had not expected a wife; he seemed so solitary. There was so much she wanted to ask him about Gizela. For much of her life, she had longed for someone who might be able to tell her something about her mother. She had given up after that visit to Suffolk all those years earlier, but suddenly the old, unanswered questions seemed to rise up again.

  ‘Ellen died four years ago,’ Patrick said. Marina had to struggle to bring her attention back to him. Ellen must have been his wife, the painter of the watercolours. ‘It was early-onset Alz heimer’s,’ said Patrick. ‘A ghastly thing. But she remembered Kentucky to the very last.’ Patrick stopped and took a sip of his tea. ‘Gizela helped me when Ellen was ill,’ he said quietly. ‘She was very capable.’

  Marina stared out the window. The sun was low in the sky, a darkening shadow across the beach like a chill presentiment of something. Even the sunset felt pallid here; a faint orange leaching and then the long night. She thought of her mother’s look of wary surprise, her distracted presence in the world. She could not imagine her for one moment as someone who might be thought of as capable.

  Marina learned from Patrick Stone that Gizela had come to the Cape twenty-one years ago. No one knew where she had come from, and in all her years there she made no friends in the town. She did not seek out company and she made it clear that she wished to be left to herself. She worked shelving books in the small library in Provincetown. It was a job that suited her because she was not required to speak to the customers. She was good at the work, quick and methodical. She also did some typing for the writers staying at the writers’ colony in Provincetown, where Patrick was the director for many years. She lived at first in a small room in a lodging house in the town, and then in the cottage
by the sea. Patrick owned the cottage, it transpired. He and Ellen had been good friends with the sea captain and had cared for him in his old age. When he died, the house was left to them. The cottage at the top of the dunes came with a large tract of land that included the marshlands and the ponds behind it. Patrick and Ellen could have sold the house and the land, but they had not wanted the sea captain’s cottage razed to the ground and some towering mansion built in its place. It would have seemed like a desecration of his memory. And then Gizela arrived.

  The light was already gone by the time Marina walked back to her mother’s house. She knelt by the fire, coaxing it into life. The twists of newspaper flared into brightness and subsided as she prodded the fire with the poker. From the corner of the living room she could just see the faint glow of light from Patrick’s cabin at the foot of the dunes. The lights of Provincetown were hidden by a gauze of clouds. Marina sat cross-legged in front of the fire, the woollen blanket from the bed wrapped around her shoulders. Gizela had been befriended; something in her had loosened enough to allow her to accept Patrick and Ellen’s restrained benevolence. Just the three of them on this sandy promontory for all those years. How well Gizela must have known this shore, this hidden corner of the world. Each morning she went walking by the sea, Patrick told her. In the warmer months Gizela walked at night. He knew this because he was a poor sleeper, a night walker too, and sometimes they met each other coming back up the path to the dunes. Both of them had loved those late walks –the thin clouds and the damp sand, the sea only a sound, the lovely pale flare from the lighthouse against the briny darkness. One summer night not long after his wife had died, Patrick told Marina shyly, he and Gizela stayed on the beach until sunrise, watching the light swell gently over the smooth dunes and the bright green coils of sea grass. Marina tried to imagine Gizela walking home along the dune path in the early morning, her coat holding the night air. A cup of coffee, a heel of bread, her solitary breakfast.