“It’s a boardinghouse, ma’am. Nice enough if you can afford it. Not for me. I can’t even afford lunch, can I?”
Marian started to apologize, but Barclay was already reaching across, thrusting a coin at the man. “Let’s go,” he said to the driver. Marian looked out the back window at the receding brick house, the tall figure flipping the coin in one hand.
* * *
—
Since the ship hadn’t been at capacity to begin with and most people chose (or were obligated) to lie low through the storm, Marian found herself in splendid isolation. In the mornings, she might drink coffee under the amber glass skylights of one lounge, and later she might read a book amid the Chinoiserie latticework of another. When a waiter offered her champagne—“Complimentary, madam”—she accepted, and then she ordered another glass and perhaps a third, counting on Barclay to be too wretched to notice her flouting of his ban on drinking. The ship pressed up from below, dropped abruptly away. Crashing sounds came at random intervals, and at times the long steel body corkscrewed or juddered violently as though passing over a washboard road. In the nights, Barclay groaned and cursed while Marian dropped effortlessly into oblivion. In the mornings, Barclay made it clear he regarded her peaceful slumber as selfish and disloyal.
“Better stay here and get some more rest, then,” she said, and went off to her coffee, her book.
By the fourth morning, the sea had mostly settled, though the clouds had not lifted. In the afternoon, she found a seat at a small table in the ladies’ lounge to avoid Barclay, who had mostly recovered from his seasickness but not his wounded pride. She had a pen and several sheets of the ship’s stationery and was planning to write to Jamie. Dear Jamie, she wrote and stopped. She’d never written him a letter before. There had never been any need.
When he’d finally come back to Missoula, he’d seemed older, melancholy about something but also more assured, more firmly himself. He appeared at the airfield one day in late August, fresh off the train. As she drove them home, he told her he’d gone to Seattle, drawn portraits in parks, found a job with a rich family. “I met a girl,” he said. “It was her family.”
“Oh? And?”
“It turned out we didn’t understand each other.”
“In what way?”
“We were just too different. It doesn’t matter—maybe it was only puppy love.”
She had smiled grimly. He didn’t know about her betrothal. “I’m glad you’re back.”
At the house, Wallace had been sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket. At first Jamie was occupied in greeting the dogs, but Marian saw his shock when Wallace rose and came unsteadily toward him.
“Are you ill, Wallace? You’re too thin.”
“I am ill,” Wallace said. “But it’s been my own making. Too much drink for too long, Jamie. I’ve made a mess of things, but Marian and Mr. Macqueen have found a doctor who will help me. I’m going to Denver soon to stay with him.”
Jamie stiffened. “What does Barclay Macqueen have to do with it?”
To Marian, Wallace said, “You haven’t told him.”
“Told me what?”
Marian couldn’t summon the words.
“Your sister is getting married,” Wallace said.
Jamie looked at Marian. “To Barclay Macqueen?”
She lifted her chin. “That’s right.”
“Why? What did he buy for you?”
She had turned and gone into the cottage, slamming the door.
Some time later, Jamie knocked. “Do you have anything to drink in here?” he asked.
“Whiskey or gin?”
“Whiskey.”
She took a bottle from a cupboard, poured two glasses.
“The real stuff,” he observed. “Not easy to come by.”
“I’ve been flying to Canada for Barclay.”
“Glad he’s willing to let you get arrested.”
“He’d rather I didn’t fly at all.”
“Why did he buy you an airplane, then?”
“Because he knew I wanted one.”
They sat, Jamie in the armchair and Marian on the bed. Jamie said, “Wallace told me Barclay paid off his debts. Is that why you’re marrying him?”
Marian had expected the question, but still it wearied her. What could she say? That she had been outmaneuvered into a state of exhaustion. That Barclay was more determined to marry her than she was to avoid marrying him. That there was nothing to do now but go forward. “Not entirely,” she said.
“Marian.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and peered at her searchingly. “No amount of money is worth marrying a man like him. We’ll find another way. There has to be one.”
Looking at Jamie was like seeing a vision of herself as a man, full of certainty that things could be set right, full of faith that new possibilities would always arise. “There’s no other way,” she said. “Believe me.”
“There is. There must be. I can’t stand to see you give up so easily.”
Easily. The weariness grew heavier. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“Tell me, then. Tell me everything so we can sort out a solution.”
How she wished there were a solution. Speaking each word slowly and clearly, she said, “Did Wallace tell you how much he owed? We could sell the house—sell everything—and still not have enough to pay it and no way ever to pay it.”
“So you’re selling yourself instead.”
She was so tired. Her voice creaked as though she were on the verge of sleep. “It’s more of a trade. Me for Wallace. And for you. If I had turned my back on Wallace, you would have been next. He wasn’t going to give up. You’d think one of you would thank me sometime.”
“No one’s asking you to be a martyr, Marian. It’s lunacy.”
“All he wants is for me to love him. He’ll be happy if he thinks I do.”
“You believe that?”
“I have to.”
“And you think you’ll be able to pretend to love him for the rest of your life?”
“I did love him. I might be able to again, despite this.”
“How can you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell him that I do. He wants to believe I do.”
“No. No. A person like that has no limits. He’ll never be satisfied. He’ll always want more from you.” Something seemed to coalesce in Jamie, some idea or resolve. “He belongs in jail. That’s the answer. Everyone knows what he does. There must be some lawman somewhere he hasn’t paid off.”
“Please just leave it alone.” This possibility that Jamie would try, in some feeble way, to avenge her honor, frightened her. “Please. You’ll only make things worse.”
Jamie’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright. “You think he’s dangerous. I can see it. You’re afraid of him. This isn’t love.”
She felt heavy as lead, too heavy to argue anymore. She told him there was nothing else to say.
Jamie hadn’t come to the wedding, and Wallace had already left to go dry out in Denver. Marian and Barclay stood in front of a judge in the Kalispell courthouse with Sadler and Barclay’s sister, Kate, as witnesses. Afterward, they’d taken a photo outside on the steps while a gusty wind blew leaves around their feet. They’d had lunch in a restaurant, and Sadler had driven them directly to Missoula to catch an eastbound train.
* * *
—
The fourth night at sea, Barclay managed to appear for dinner. Instead of going to smoke cigars after, he joined her for a turn on deck. He held her arm and made her walk on the inside, away from the railing, as though she were the unsteady one. Beyond the ship lay blowing darkness, an absolute void. “It’s not pleasant to imagine falling in,” Barclay said.
“It reminds me of flying through cloud at night. Sometimes you feel as though you don�
�t even exist at all.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Or liberating. You realize how little you matter.”
He gathered her under his arm. “You matter.”
“Not really. No one does.” They were strolling beneath the long line of davit-hung lifeboats, a procession of keels passing overhead. She said, “We must be close to where the Josephina went down.”
“I don’t like to think about it,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d known my parents. Wallace has said, or not quite said, that they weren’t happy together. They married hastily.” But who was she to judge anyone’s reasons for marrying? Her parents might have known full well they would be unhappy and had bound themselves together anyway for reasons long lost. “Jamie and I would have been children in that house in New York. I can’t imagine it. If you change one thing, you change everything.”
“It would have been terrible,” Barclay said, kissing the back of her glove, “because I wouldn’t have met you.”
What would Wallace’s life have been like if the twins had never been sent to him? She had called the doctor in Denver long distance before they left New York. Wallace seemed committed to his treatment, he said, though the process was not easy, especially not in the early stages. Wallace, when he came to the phone, sounded shaky but lucid. He said he was beginning to hope he would be able to paint again.
“I wonder if I would have learned to fly,” she said to Barclay.
They had reached the stern. “I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“Because flying is in your bones.” She peered at his shadowed face above the faint white glow of his shirtfront, surprised. She wanted to say that she, too, believed this, but before she could, he added, “That’s how I felt when I saw you. You were in my bones.”
He was always busy choosing bits and pieces of their lives to weave into the story he was constructing around them like a bird building a nest, like a prisoner building a prison. But when he leaned close to her, her body responded, as it always did. At least there was that. She held him tightly, using him as a shield against the void that pressed in around the ship.
Edinburgh, Scotland
November 1931
One month later
A clever puzzle of a city, assembled from blocks of pale, sooty stone. Marian, out walking, often found herself above or below where she wanted to be, as the cobbled streets made a complex lattice wedged in among the abrupt rises and falls of the underlying landscape, navigable only via tunnels and narrow passageways, bridges and steep, hidden stairways. Glimpses of the sea came and went. The castle lay curled like a sleeping dragon at the top of the main street, while, on the other side of town, a massive rough outcropping of rock, the Salisbury Crags, stood up higher than all the spires and domes and chimneys as though in primitive rebuke to human ambition.
Many days—most—were uncompromisingly gray, but sometimes in the afternoons a cold, clear yellow light slanted down, bringing every stone and slate and chimney pot into almost unbearably sharp focus. Marian had heard someone—one of Barclay’s acquaintances—describe Edinburgh as being like a shabby tuxedo. She didn’t think the comparison held. Yes, Edinburgh was both elegant and well used, but it was too solid and too ancient to be likened to a garment, too hewn and heavy. Missoula seemed like an Indian camp in comparison, something you could roll up and carry away on your back.
Barclay often left her alone during the day while he went off on business. To her shame, she found she was not quite the intrepid traveler she had imagined. She worried about making etiquette missteps, understanding Scottish accents, being conspicuous. Mostly she drifted through the streets without speaking to anyone, or she read in the hotel’s library. Without Barclay, she felt timid, but with him she felt squashed and crowded. He chose what they did and when. He ordered for her in restaurants without asking what she wanted. They went into the Highlands to visit friends of his, to a frigid lodge set on the edge of a black lake. At the long, candlelit dinner table in a cavernous room where the walls bristled with antlers, Barclay became an unfamiliar iteration of himself, at ease in formal wear and able to chatter blandly about hunting and land rights. This malleability unsettled Marian. Who was he, this man? Since the wedding, she’d felt frozen, like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow, uncertain how to respond, torn between hating him for Wallace’s sake and wanting to love him for her own.
One morning, alone, after nearly half an hour spent examining the timetables in Waverley Station and gathering her nerve, she took a train to Glasgow. If Edinburgh was a shabby tuxedo, Glasgow was a tuxedo worn by a chimney sweep. She walked along the River Clyde, trying to catch a glimpse of the shipyards where the Josephina had been built, but the day was chill and foggy, and she didn’t know where to go. The poor neighborhoods near the water spooked her, the way people’s eyes lingered on her fine coat, her glossy handbag. If she’d been in her old clothes she wouldn’t have worried, but her coat and bag and little clip-clopping shoes advertised her as rich and helpless.
On the return train, she’d blinked back tears of frustration. Here she was, away from Missoula, finally on an actual journey, and yet she was more confined than ever. The bulk of Britain to the south and the greater mass of Europe below it were so near, just over the horizon. But she could go nowhere at all.
Edinburgh
November 13, 1931
Dear Jamie,
I meant to write you from the ship, not that I could have posted a letter except maybe in a bottle. I have no excuse for why I haven’t written since then, seeing as we arrived in Edinburgh nearly a month ago. Do you know I’ve never written you a letter? There was never any need.
What I want to say is that it pains me to be on the outs with you. I haven’t forgotten you warned me early on to be cautious of Barclay and I didn’t listen. Or not well enough. I thought I could manage. By the time you came back from Seattle, there was nothing to do but yield—please trust me—though that doesn’t mean there weren’t other solutions, earlier, that I didn’t see or ignored. I was blinded by my desire to fly, and maybe it explains some small part of things to admit I did feel drawn to Barclay, always, from the beginning. That pull seems to justify so much. Maybe you know what I mean. You never really told me about the girl in Seattle. I wish we’d had a better chance to talk. I know I have a tendency to hog the spotlight, and I’m afraid I did it again.
In any event, here I am. A wife. I’m told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We’re celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation. The central danger now is of Barclay getting his way yet again—he wants a baby, and a baby is what I dread most. It seems an awful snare. I’ve told him I can scarcely imagine ever having one and absolutely not anytime soon, and I thought he understood, but—no, he does understand. It’s that he doesn’t care. He wants me snared.
It’s strange to think of you all alone in Wallace’s house. Do you drive the Ford? I hope so. Do you see Caleb? Have you been drawing? What do you hear from Wallace? If you see Mr. Stanley, will you give him my regards?
At least this hotel has a library. I feel like I’m a child again, with all these hours I’ve had to myself to read. Over my life I’ve had so much time to myself. But, Jamie, I never felt lonely before now because I was never on the outs with you. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t realized how much I’ve relied on you. I feel I’ve lost a wing and am now just a useless ball of junk, falling. I hope you will write back and say you are still there, unseen but intact.
I’ll go out now and mail this myself so there’s no chance of Barclay intercepting it. A wife can have no expectation of privacy. A sister sends only love.
Your Marian
P.S.—We will be here f
or almost three more weeks, so if this letter is not delayed and you write back promptly—and if I’ve ever begged you for anything, it is that you would—I’ll have a good chance of getting it before we start the journey home.
Missoula
December 1, 1931
Dear Marian,
I’ll take the easy way and answer your questions first. I hadn’t been driving your car, but once I got your letter I decided I would. Thank you very much. It makes a nice change from creaky old Fiddler or my bicycle. You asked about Caleb. I see him the way you might spot a wolf in the woods—only from time to time and always with a thrill. Last week he came over to the house and we had a drink and listened to Wallace’s phonograph. He is still himself, though I’d say a little too aware of the mountain man role his customers expect him to play. Sadly Gilda is not well at all. I asked Caleb if he could afford to send her to the doctor in Denver, but he said she would never go and I believe he’s right. At least she has stopped having men in since Caleb now gives her plenty of money to drink away.
You asked if I have been drawing, and I have. I’ve been trying my hand at oil paints, too, although to be honest mostly what I’ve been doing is moping. Maybe there’s something about this house that turns men into mopers. The girl in Seattle—I don’t have the patience to write down the whole story, and I wouldn’t assume you’d have the patience to read it. But I will say I had hoped she would be taking up less space in my thoughts by now. One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both. I always thought I’d go to the U and join the Forest Service, but now I’m having trouble imagining myself there. My vision of life with Sarah has made my old ideas look shabby in comparison.
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