by Dawn Tripp
Since that time, Elizabeth had allowed herself to grow attuned to the younger woman’s rhythms. She especially loved the mornings—the early rising, the slow tip of the water from the pitcher into the washbowl, the slow dress, the descent into the dining room, the slow buttering of toast. Once in a while, the increasing slowness concerned her—the awareness that her life was gaining on her.
It was useless to fear death. She knew that. But in her heart there was a slight dread. She would try to sense its temperature, its dimensions, geometry and smell. Even as her body slowed, it quickened.
“There’s a door I see sometimes, Maggie,” Elizabeth says. “A flat door—the kind a man will cut into a cellar. There’s a knob on it, and the hinges open inward.”
Maggie smiles. She is careful with the bristles not to nick the skin on Elizabeth’s neck. She draws the brush down over and over again.
Elizabeth does not say anything more about the door. She does not mention that she has spent a good part of her seventy years walking past it. Or around it. Not opening it. Crossing to the other side of her mind whenever she is led to brush too close. She will put as much distance as she can between herself and that small flat-paneled door.
By the time Maggie is finished, the old woman’s hair is silken. The kerosene light flays the strands into a silvery burn.
Maggie helps her into bed, takes a small bottle of juniper oil, and sits down on a stool beside the bed. She pushes back her sleeves, takes one of Elizabeth’s hands and rubs the oil into the blustery skin around the knuckles.
“You eat too much salt,” she says.
Elizabeth settles back against the pillow. She sighs. “Did I ever tell you about the king who killed his enemy and sewed the head up into his own skull? He walked through his whole life that way. I used to wonder how he knew which set of eyes he was using to see.”
Maggie says nothing. She takes a few more drops of the oil and tugs the fingers gently one by one until they move again more easily in the joint.
Elizabeth had always made lists. She liked to keep her things in order. Neatly pressed. She made laundry lists. Grocery lists. Lists of tasks and books to be read.
She kept the lists in a small black writing book that she carried in a pocket of her skirt. She had Maggie cut a pocket the size of that small black writing book and sew it into every skirt she owned. Maggie would make the pocket in a fold, in a crease, along a seam, so the book of lists could not be seen, but Elizabeth always had it close to her, its hardness striking a comfortable rhythm, assurance against the side of her thigh. At night, she kept the book of lists beside the milk-shade lamp on the night table next to her bed. She needed it. It held her steady. It provided a balanced counterweight to the unexplored, oblique side of her mind.
She lets herself sink deeper into the bedsheets. She lets her face go into the coolness of Maggie’s hands, the fingers pressing in to smooth the slight dent between her eyes.
“Leave it on,” Elizabeth murmurs as Maggie goes to snuff the lamp. “Trim the wick a bit, but leave it on. I think I’ll read awhile tonight.”
Maggie nods. She sets the lamp and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
Elizabeth waits until she hears Maggie’s footsteps on the stairs. Then, she hauls her settling body out of bed. The floor is cool and damp under her feet as she steps off the rug. She goes into her dressing closet. In the deep corner behind several boxes of shoes is a steamer trunk packed with old blankets and folded navigation maps. She digs to the bottom and draws out a round cardboard hatbox she had papered with grass cloth. Over the years the strands of raw silk have grown hopelessly frayed. She carries the hatbox back into her bed. She props herself up against the pillows, takes off the lid, and flips through the contents: old newspaper cuttings, letters, recipes, daguerreotypes, small watercolors, black-and-white etchings, ticket stubs. Next to an old menu from the Knickerbocker Hotel, she finds Sean’s postcard. Dated 1869. The year she turned twenty-one.
Praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
He had left on Hallow’s Eve. Samhain. Night of apples. Night of the dead. When the linen between the seen and the unseen is most thin.
Every year on that night, Sean would slip away from her with a crowd of older boys. They would go off tipping sheds and outhouses, chasing cows out of their pastures, setting small gin fires in a horse’s stall. Once they coated the clear glass windows of the Congregational church with eggs and hay. And on the door, Ciarian MacDonough painted an image of the Virgin dressed in a manure robe.
On that last Samhain night Sean disappeared, he had cut an apple for her down the middle. He showed her the five-armed star of seed in the heart and gave her half.
“Bury one for me next year, Lizzie,” he said and kissed her on the cheek. Later, when they could not find him, she could feel the place on her face where the skin had tightened with the tack of the juice—the apple stain his mouth had left.
Six months passed before she received her first and last postcard from him. He was working his way west, he wrote. He had signed on with a crew to build the Union Pacific Railroad Bridge in Green River, Wyoming, at fifty cents a day. In ten weeks, he’d be heading to Rockerville, Dakota Territory, where a fellow had told him the panners were pulling acres of gold.
West had always been the direction they were walking. In Connaught, it had been the direction of water, seals, Inishshark, the abandoned well of the Saint on Clare. It had been the direction of every story Elizabeth’s father had told—the direction of exile and dreaming. But Elizabeth was not like Sean. She was not one of those who reached. She had stopped after the crossing. On the other side of the Atlantic, she had settled.
Now, nearly fifty years later, she runs her fingers across the postcard: her brother’s lean tight script with its broken e’s. The ink barely seems dry. Sean had always had trouble penning e’s. Left handed—she remembers suddenly—the blade of the knife as he had sliced the apple in half.
She sets the postcard down on the pillow beside her, and as she does, she notices her hands—shadowy and blue against the sheet. She raises them to the light. Her fingers wander through the space like young orchids.
At a certain point (she remembers this now), at a point when she was still a girl, every moment had a sheen to it. Every moment was invested with meaning, weight. Anticipation, preparation for the great event she was moving toward: the unfolding of her life. Sean had always been at the heart of that. And when he was gone, it was as if some golden edge were lost. Around that time—around the time of Sean’s leaving—Elizabeth met Henry. They would walk together in the evenings on the Concord village green. She could feel the curvature in space around him that his dreams made—dreams of teaching and society, his work with Agassiz, dreams of a young wife, children, and the far-off solar light of Baffin Bay. On the night he slipped that glittering white stone onto her hand, she gave herself up and fell into the slow warp toward him.
Slowly, she flips through the hatbox until she finds the yellowed wedding invitation. She had pressed it onto cardboard the night after they were married with an epoxy glue that formed small hard pillows at each corner.
Praise what is truly alive …
She had known in the weeks before. She had felt the running out of air. She had noticed, almost from a distance, the fluttering pressure that had come to live inside her chest. As young as she was—as in love as she thought she was—she had moved through the scattered acts of preparation, the choosing of colors and china, flowers, the contours of the day, with the clear and resolute understanding that she was approaching the end of her life. On that day, her wedding day, the flung-out expansiveness of her past and future would be thinned into a strip of careful needlework under glass.
She would have passion with Henry. But it was a passion within defined parameters. She would feel joy as his wife and the freedom that came with being owned. She would move through her days with a warm cotton stuffed inside her ears. T
here were tantrums, lovemaking, acts of learned helplessness. There were dinner parties, candlelight, drinking, poached salmon, leek soup, asparagus with hollandaise and brittle conversation. She would sit at the head of a table lined with guests, nodding, smiling, with the velvet upholstered chair against her arm. She might glance at Henry at the other end. He would catch her eye and she’d recede, light-years away inside herself.
Henry had told her once, joking with her as he did in bed, that it was her faith that had drawn him toward her—
“It’s so matter-of-fact for you, Lizzie,” he had said to her one night in the winter sheets. “You take God for granted, and it makes you irresistible. You know, that faith is what we are all looking for.” He had gripped her by the hips as he spoke, as if he could impress the urgency of his need into her flesh.
“Yes, Henry,” she answered. She was six months full with Charles, and the ball in her belly forced her to lie on her side. Henry’s face was at her shoulder. She could feel his breath like a slight fever on her neck.
He went on talking and she listened vaguely, watching the light from the tallow candle play across the washbasin. She had never questioned her faith, its source or proof. She had never demanded anything of it. It was unromantic. It had no organization or form. It was thoughtless, spontaneous—a crude and simple melding of her father’s Christ, her mother’s Saints, and the earthy superstitions all the Irish wore close to the skin. Her faith had never been something outside herself. Never something she needed an object for. It came naturally to her—to believe that the body was a vessel shed at death and that spirit was recycled like the air.
She had met God for the first time as a child when she ran with Sean through the blighted fields under a sky that seemed to breathe and stretch around them. She reached the top of the hill before he did. She scrambled up over the rocks until she came to the massive tree on the outcrop, its roots wrapped around stone. Deep beyond her, she could see the Bens—their jagged shapes hovering like low clouds at the edge of the world. The valley opened into a green sea underneath her with the crusts of houses. She let herself fall back into that sky, and it had held her—blue and inexhaustible—as the green earth turned under her feet.
She did not tell Henry this. She did not tell him that the secret of faith was in the letting go. “You won’t find Him by searching,” she could have said. But she said nothing.
He had slept heavily that night with his leg slung across her body. In the long window behind the cedar chest she watched the snow fall in slow and steady crowds through the light of the street lanterns, then back into darkness and out of view.
Henry left several months later for the Arctic, and when the telegram arrived, even before Elizabeth opened it (that slim, evenly folded paper—she was enthralled by the perfection of the folds—how each edge lined up with each crease in such a perfect order, the kind of order she had always craved), but before she opened it, even before she slid the blade of the letter knife through the gum, she knew its contents and she realized that what she would grieve was not Henry, the man, but the comfort of lying awake beside him, the warmth of his body across hers, the weight of his sleep.
She would miss the gauze, the sense of being once removed from her own life. She would miss being able to wrap herself into the steady dullness of his voice. She would miss the tangible solace that came with knowing what she had given up.
Memory, she knows, can be mapped like a storm: by its variations in pressure, its depressions and troughs. And yet, aging, she has come to understand that a storm when it arrives has a shape, a passion, an impact and a cost that cannot be measured in advance.
Now, sitting in her bed with the hatbox open next to her, Elizabeth can feel a strange tugging in her chest, a slight wind as if something has begun to shift and give inside her and is funneling, a soft fire.
She puts the wedding invitation back into the box where she found it. She replaces the lid and sets the hatbox on the floor next to her bed. She will put it away tomorrow. But she keeps Sean’s postcard. She takes the book of lists from her nightstand and slips the postcard in to mark the next blank page. She snuffs out the lamp.
That night, Elizabeth dreams she is in the boxcar of a moving train. The child, Eve, has come for breakfast, but there is nothing to feed her. Elizabeth offers boiled oats, soda bread, and eggs, but her granddaughter shakes her head and pours herself a glass of peaty water from the pitcher. She cuts an apple in half and shows the old woman the star in the center. The walls are dark, and there is a hearth in the corner of the train, its ashes smoored. The ceiling is low, held with the same bog oak timbers that lined the inside roof of her father’s house in Connemara. The chimney shaft disappears through the thatch. The child wipes her lips with a linen cloth. She is watching two white birds skim across the river that winds parallel to the train. They are traveling west, and the men are land-making in the fields.
Eve picks up one quarter of the apple she has cut. Her small white teeth nibble at the skin easily, gently, her attention fixed on the flesh as she pulls it away.
Across the room, the book of lists is lying on a slab of rock that rests on two smaller stones. As Elizabeth gets up and walks toward it, the sun strikes through the door and fills the room with a blinding sulfur-colored light. She can see then that the walls have been painted, as Eve painted her walls, with the dead. Some look starved, some wounded. There are soldiers and haggard old men, broken women, and children with their faces thin and blue. Their lips black from eating the poisoned root. She looks for one that is familiar. The one she has been waiting for. She looks for Henry, for her mother or her sisters. She looks for Eve’s mother, Alice. She looks for Sean. But they are strangers. All of them.
Elizabeth wakes in the middle of the night and crawls from her bed. Her left hip hurts. She takes the book of lists off her nightstand and lights the candle Maggie has left on the chest by the door. She walks down the hall to her granddaughter’s room. She stands in the doorway, watching the child sleep.
Eve sleeps deeply with the blankets pulled close around her chin, so only her small face is visible, the pale hair floating on the pillow around it. Elizabeth comes closer. She blows out the candle and kneels beside the bed. Her knees ache. She feels through the blanket for the child’s hand and finds it curled in a loose fist by her side.
She sits there in the dark and whispers the stories to her. She can only remember them at night, and when she cannot sleep, she will come and hold the child’s hand and she will tell her that the place of stories is like the place of memory. It is like the place of the dead. An ether around them all the time. She tells her the adventures of the pirate warrior Grace and the trials of CúChulainn. She tells her the story of the cows who came up from the sea. She tells her of Oisin, who followed Niamh of the Golden Hair, and how, when he returned to Erin, he found he had been gone for hundreds of years. The land had changed. The church had come and the bog had risen. He could find nothing, no one, he had known from before.
“He was in love,” she whispers, “and the time had seemed so short to him.” The child stirs in her sleep. Elizabeth lets go of her hand.
She returns to her own bed. She pulls the chenille close around her chin. She can feel the window sash give under the pressure of the wind. Just beyond her, the curtains rustle in the darkness.
The following afternoon, Elizabeth and Eve sit together in the living room waiting for Charles to drive up from the garage with the car. They don’t speak. Elizabeth settles in one corner of the Hepplewhite sofa that has been reupholstered in ivory silk. As she picks at a stain on the arm—a bit of berry jam—she notices a prickling heat around the collar of her dress as if spiders have come to spin inside the lace.
She glances up at the child. The birdcage Windsor spokes of the chair fan up behind her like some queer tail. Eve keeps her small gloved hands folded neatly on her lap. Her white stockings crossed at the ankle dangle just above the floor. Her eyes are the color of soft water. She sits st
ill, perfectly quiet and contained. Yet there is something unlatched about her. Something disturbing or disturbed. A vacancy that seems familiar.
On the crossing, Elizabeth’s father had carried a vial of the holy water from St. Fiechin’s Well. When he died, Elizabeth took the vial back to Skirdagh and kept it in the sea chest at the foot of her bed. She never opened it. Never unstopped the cork from its lean-necked end. Sometimes in the deep winter, she would take it out, unwrap it from its chamois cloth, and hold it in the palm of her hand. Over time, she had watched the water level drop, slowly evaporating through the pores in the cork until only the pith remained—a slight film of dust piled at the bottom of the glass. Now, studying the child across the room, she has the sudden chilling sense that what she sees in Eve is not, as she has always thought, the strange damage and the lawlessness of Alice but, rather, some quiet essence of Elizabeth’s own nature—an image of herself when she was young and her heart was free and wild.
“Do you know the story of the willow?” she asks, nodding to the tree outside the window.
The child shakes her head.
“The willow will sprout from just a branch pushed in the soil.”
The child doesn’t answer. One of her eyes is swollen at the edge. A pinkness has begun to creep across the lid. She rubs at it.
“Leave it alone,” Elizabeth says.
The child drops her hand into her lap.
They sit together, waiting, in the awkward silence.
God was something Elizabeth had never questioned—did not doubt, did not think about or fear—her faith was as natural to her as air.