Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  He thought that when he and Sarah had walked around the lake he must have conveyed his feelings about animals, the burden of his anguish for them. Even if he hadn’t, he thought she ought to have intuited something. Or, really, he thought she ought to feel the same way he did.

  Though he barely wanted to admit it, he’d already begun entertaining fantasies of finding a way to study at UW with Sarah, to become a real artist in Seattle, to be a young husband who came home to a pleasant, sunny house and kissed his wife and infant. The idea of a family of his own making had been more exotic and beguiling than anything he’d ever considered, and now…? Tainted, ruined.

  He wondered if some primal memory of the sinking of the Josephina had lodged in him and, over time, morphed into an outsize horror of fear and helplessness, of mass death. Though he didn’t think his horror could be outsize, really. How could it ever be big enough? And yet it must be somehow disproportionate because most people seemed untroubled by the origins of the meat they ate, by the scrawny dogs everywhere, abandoned in hard times, likely to starve or be picked up by the dogcatcher and killed. Why couldn’t he make peace? The world was not going to change. He would be happier if he could simply forget.

  He skipped dinner and lay on his bed in the boardinghouse as evening purpled the window.

  He loved Caleb, and Caleb killed animals. But hunting pained Jamie less than slaughter. Hunting was an intersection of two lives, not a corralling, an extermination.

  But Sarah wasn’t the one cutting throats. To condemn her would be unfair. He hated that her father would be paying him in blood money, but maybe there was some good in relieving such a man of a tiny bit of his surplus fortune. (A very tiny bit.) He would also promise himself to do something good with some of the money. To buy food for stray dogs. Yes, that was what he would do. And otherwise he would try to put the slaughterhouses out of his mind.

  * * *

  —

  That he found himself enjoying his time at Hereford House was both a relief and reason for self-recrimination. First and foremost, there was Sarah, who appeared unexpectedly and irregularly, climbing up to the attic (he had chosen to begin in the attic) to help sift through dusty files, matching scribbled receipts to miscellaneous drawings and paintings. The infatuation he’d felt after their first walks had been deflated a bit by the mounting evidence that she saw nothing wrong with her father’s business, but his attraction was undiminished. Not that she was flirtatious. She was sharp and attentive and meticulous. She seemed to relish setting things in order. He didn’t dare try to kiss her.

  Alice had been waiting for him that first Monday morning, determined he would not do anything before he’d drawn her portrait. “We’ll go outside for the light,” she’d announced.

  He drew her sitting under a cherry tree behind the house, her arms wrapped around one knee, seeming to suppress a smile. As he was working, another tall female figure came striding across the lawn in a skirt and cardigan, Jasper lumbering in her wake.

  “The Portraitist at work!” Mrs. Fahey said in a voice even lower and richer than Sarah’s.

  Jamie scrambled to his feet. She offered her hand. Sargent’s portrait was apt, though she’d aged. Her hair was cut in a blunt bob, and her face was bare of makeup and full of amused intelligence.

  “Let’s see it,” she said, holding a hand out for the drawing pad, which he had lifted, out of protective instinct, toward his chest. “Oh!” she said, when he handed it over. “But it’s wonderful. I shouldn’t be surprised. What you did of Sarah was marvelous, but this is…it’s a whole scene. I’m going to have both of them framed.”

  “Don’t you think he should do one of Jasper, Mother?” said Alice.

  “Certainly. And one of Penelope and the baby.” She gave the drawing pad back to Jamie. “Penelope is my eldest daughter. She has a new baby. I’d want you to draw my son and my other daughter, too, so I could have a complete set, but they’re away.”

  “And you,” said Alice, still under the tree.

  “What about me?”

  “He should draw you, too. See how it stacks up against the Sargent.”

  Jamie said, “I think the comparison would be depressing.”

  Mrs. Fahey raised an eyebrow. “For you? Or me?”

  “Me!” he said. “Of course. I mean—I would be happy to try, if you want.”

  “Good, then,” she said, amused. “So you shall.”

  * * *

  —

  July turned to August.

  He made progress cataloging the art, but the job was too big for half a summer. Still, he persisted, sorting and describing as best he could. Examining so many drawings and paintings was an education. He looked carefully at each piece, considered what the artist had achieved versus what might have been intended. Much of the work seemed mediocre at best. (“My husband’s greatest pleasure is in the hoarding of his treasures,” Mrs. Fahey said one day. “He takes pleasure in their number and in their being his.”) But the collection also included many fine pieces and more than a few extraordinary ones. As instructed, Jamie set aside any that struck a chord in him, including a set of a dozen unidentified small watercolors he found in a shallow box tied closed with ribbon. They were washes of color: gyres of gray and blue, or bands of brilliant orange and green, and though they could not be said to be clearly of anything, Jamie was certain their subject was the sea. Something illegible was scribbled on their backs—a signature, maybe. If the expert from UW came, Jamie almost hoped he would say the watercolors were junk because then he might be bold enough to ask if he could keep them.

  In the evenings, on his way home, he bought cans of tongue or hash, loaves of day-old bread, whatever was cheap, and fed stray dogs. Sometimes he sketched them, a few quick lines. He hated when they snarled and snapped among themselves or when they followed him back to the boardinghouse.

  If Mr. Fahey was not expected home early, Sarah might go for a walk with Jamie after he’d finished cataloging for the day. He’d finally gotten his nerve up to kiss her. The first time had been unexpectedly simple. She’d come with him to feed the strays. At their feet, a dog was devouring a mound of canned meat, and he had leaned forward and put his mouth on Sarah’s. They’d both stood perfectly still, lips together, until Sarah pulled softly away. The next time, beside the waterfront, was not simple. Her long pliant body had bowed against his, and in his excitement he grasped her too roughly, startling her. With a little practice, though, they found an equilibrium that, while not quite satisfying, was sustainable enough. He could hold her in his arms if no one was around to see but not squeeze her too hard or push her against a wall, not feel her breasts. Sometimes, though, she forgot herself and pulled him closer, one of her long thighs sliding between his. This never lasted long. She would snap back to propriety and extricate herself, as disorientated as an awakened dreamer, her cheeks flushed.

  “Tell me more about your adventures,” she would say sometimes, and he told her about how he and Marian and Caleb had hitchhiked to Seeley Lake and then hiked the fifty miles back through the mountains, or how they’d once found a human skeleton in the woods with a hatchet lodged in its moss-speckled skull, or about the rail-yard bull smacking his shins. “I don’t know if those are really adventures,” he said.

  “They are!” she exclaimed. “I’ll never get to do anything exciting. I wish I could meet Marian and Caleb,” she said. “And Wallace.”

  “Maybe you will someday.”

  A melancholy Madonna smile. “I don’t think they’d be very impressed by me.”

  They would find her alien, daunting, prim. They wouldn’t know how to be around her. It didn’t matter. This—what was between him and Sarah—was his. “They don’t know anyone like you.”

  “I don’t know anyone like them. I wish I were more like them.”

  This was the moment to tell her everything he’d left out. Wall
ace’s drinking. Barclay Macqueen. The creak of the porch’s screen door in the night, when Caleb came for Marian. But instead he kissed her again.

  * * *

  —

  When he could, he made drawings of her, sometimes from life, sometimes from memory. Some he gave to her, some he kept. “I love these because I love thinking about you looking at me,” she said. “It’s a very particular kind of vanity.”

  * * *

  —

  Occasionally, when Sarah and Alice were both out, Mrs. Fahey invited him for afternoon coffee in a small glassed-in conservatory that was her particular domain. To get to it, he passed through a parlor that also seemed to be her own. There was no art in these rooms. The walls of her parlor were clean and white, sparsely hung with photographs of her family. Her conservatory held potted ferns, a dog cushion, and a round marble table with wicker chairs where they sat. She asked him many of the same questions Sarah had about his life, but since he was not consumed with romantic anxiety and carnal longings, he could relax more into his account of himself, find opinions he hadn’t quite known he possessed.

  “I wish my sister were more ladylike,” he surprised himself by saying one day.

  Mrs. Fahey smiled with a deeper melancholy than Sarah’s. “Why? Does she want that, too?”

  “No, she doesn’t,” he said frankly. “But her life seems so much more difficult than it needs to be. If she had a girl’s haircut and wore girls’ clothes, and if she’d kept going to school and didn’t care so much about airplanes, everything would be simpler.” At Trout’s funeral, when Barclay Macqueen had turned around to shake Jamie’s hand, there had been something sneering and triumphant in his face, as though Jamie were a bested rival. Peace be with you.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Fahey agreed. “It probably would be.”

  “If she’d had a mother, would she have turned out this way? Do you think?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Mothers don’t control everything, though sometimes we’d like to. I’ve learned—too slowly, but I have learned—that attempts to control others are likely to backfire. I worked for the passage of Prohibition because I earnestly believed women’s lives would be better—easier, as you say—if their husbands couldn’t go out and drink their paychecks away and come home and do the vile things drunk men sometimes do. But I was naïve. People’s wishes for their own lives tend to outweigh others’ ideas about how they should behave.” She paused. “We must bend in the wind sometimes, Jamie. So much is beyond our control.”

  Jamie quashed a tremor of impatience that he couldn’t explain things better, not to this woman sitting in her glass room, serene in her belief that his doting uncle had sent him to Seattle for a summer with his cousins. “Marian doesn’t always see the problems she’s creating for herself.”

  “Is it that you think if she were more ladylike you wouldn’t have to worry about her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She leaned forward. “Would you draw her for me? Your sister? I’d like to see what she looks like.”

  So he summoned Marian from a blank page. He forced himself to draw her as she was, with her cropped hair and her sharp, almost insolent gaze. As he drew, he felt a tug deep in his guts, like he’d swallowed a hook and the reel was back in Montana.

  Mrs. Fahey looked at the drawing for a long time. “Yes, I see. She’s formidable.” She sighed and patted his forearm. “You’ve had to take care of each other more than most children and grow up quickly. It must have been very hard sometimes.”

  When he was safely in the attic, he sat on the floor and wept. He had not known how badly he had wanted someone to say exactly that.

  * * *

  —

  During a spell of unusual heat in the third week of August, the art expert from UW came, a sprightly man in a bow tie who proceeded rapidly along Hereford House’s walls, stooping one moment and stretching on tiptoe the next, peering through his spectacles as though his whole body were a kind of specially designed art-evaluating scope. From time to time he jotted in a notebook. Jamie followed along, offering what insight he could, all of which the expert greeted either with irritable mm-hmms or silence.

  Twice Jamie mentioned he had set aside some works that seemed noteworthy. “I doubt that was necessary,” the man said, pulling a small nautical painting from the wall and turning it over.

  “Mr. Fahey asked me to. So we could get your opinion.”

  “Oh, yes?” He hung the painting back on its nail. “What are your qualifications exactly?”

  “I’ve been cataloging the work.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Mr. Fahey came home in midafternoon, when the two of them were surveying the music room. He pumped the expert’s hand, boomed pleasantries at him, demanded to know what he thought. “Your honest opinion,” he said.

  “It’s a very, very interesting collection,” the expert said. “You have many first-rate pieces, as you know. The Sargent, for example. Truly remarkable.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. The house’s gloom made the heat especially stifling.

  “My wife is the subject,” Mr. Fahey said with pride.

  “Is it really?” said the expert, even though Jamie had already told him. “Remarkable!”

  “There’s been talk of a museum,” Mr. Fahey said. “The Fahey Museum. I like the sound of that, I have to say.”

  The expert swabbed his face again. “It’s an intriguing idea. Perhaps—just as a preliminary impression—this collection might not be quite enough on its own, judging only what I’ve seen thus far, but certainly you’ve laid an excellent foundation.” Delicately: “You do know they’ve begun building an art museum in Volunteer Park? To house the Fuller collection?”

  Mr. Fahey’s face clouded. “Of course I know,” he said. “I can practically see it from my bedroom.”

  The expert winced but pressed ahead. “Have you considered perhaps joining forces?”

  Mr. Fahey eyed him suspiciously. “I have.”

  The expert became conciliatory. “A first step, I think, would be to have someone come in and start sorting through everything, cataloging it. I assume you have records of purchases? Attributions? Provenances?”

  “That’s what Jamie’s been doing.” Mr. Fahey fixed Jamie with a perplexed stare. “Didn’t you tell him?”

  “I’m sure this young man’s been doing his best,” the expert said, “but it’s a job for someone with real expertise.”

  Mr. Fahey appeared embarrassed. “The boy’s a gifted artist,” he said. “I wanted to give him a helping hand. No harm in him rummaging through the lot.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” the expert said primly.

  Jamie’s face flamed. The man hadn’t even looked at his notes, his meticulous lists, his assembled clues and theories about what exactly Mr. Fahey had bought for himself. Certainly Jamie hadn’t uncovered all the answers—that would be impossible—but he was confident he’d been useful. Nor had the expert deigned to look at the pieces he’d brought down from the attic and set aside; he knew those were worth at least a glance.

  “Jamie,” said Mr. Fahey, “go get one of your portraits to show him.”

  Now his humiliation would be compounded by being treated like a child, made to present his own work as though begging to be indulged with praise. Stiffly, he said, “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “Go on now,” Mr. Fahey said as though sending away a dog hovering too close to the dinner table.

  Jamie trudged through the hot, dark house to Mrs. Fahey’s parlor. The four portraits—Sarah’s, Alice’s, her own, and that of Penelope, the eldest sister, who had come over one afternoon to sit for him with her baby—were hanging, framed, in a row. He yanked down Alice’s and trudged back, offered it with his head down.

  The expert scrutinized the drawing, then peered at Jamie through his spectacles as though
he were another artwork to be evaluated. “Who taught you to draw?”

  “His uncle,” said Mr. Fahey at the same time Jamie said, firmly, “No one.”

  “You said your uncle did,” Mr. Fahey told Jamie. To the expert, he added, “His uncle is the painter Wallace Graves. I own a landscape of his, actually.”

  “I taught myself,” Jamie said, digging his hands into his pockets.

  “Mm-hmm,” said the expert. He looked over the portrait again, then back at Jamie. “You said you’d selected some works you especially liked?”

  * * *

  —

  There would be a celebratory dinner, and Jamie must stay. Mr. Fahey insisted; everyone insisted. The watercolor sketches he’d found in the ribbon-tied box, the washes of color that suggested the moods of the ocean, were by J. M. W. Turner. The expert was almost certain. They were valuable, important, remarkable, and might so easily have gone overlooked. For his part, Jamie was both vindicated and disappointed, as he had decided that if the expert would not look at the works he’d picked out, he was going to take the watercolors back to the boardinghouse that very night and then, soon enough, to Missoula. He still wished, just a little, that he had taken them when he first found them, told no one.

  “Well done,” Mr. Fahey had said to Jamie at least half a dozen times. “I knew I saw something in you.”

  Even with the windows open, the dining room was sweltering. Sweat dampened the women’s temples. Mr. Fahey kept mopping his brow with his napkin. The second-eldest Fahey sister, Nora, the art history student, had just returned from Europe, and Penelope had come over with her husband and infant and nanny. There was talk that Jamie must draw Nora after dinner to complete the pantheon in Mrs. Fahey’s parlor.