by Dawn Tripp
Eve looks down at the paper in her hand. Between the fourth and fifth word is a break—a moment of possibility—that might bend open into something awake and larger than itself. But the whole—what is it that she cannot grasp about the whole?
Lovers in their brief delight
gamble both worlds away …
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken—
Jake had spoken the verses to her that afternoon as he carried her from the sandflat toward the bank. He had spoken them under his breath as if he were reading the words from the rain and he was not aware that they came to her out loud. She had recognized them from the book of the drunken Sufi poet, and Jake had carried her—the memory burns in her now that she is home—he had lifted her off the flat, moved her body through space—she was weightless—she remembers this—her own weightlessness—she remembers her hands on his neck with the rain, and when they reached the bank, he lifted her again, gently above him—the river swirled around his waist—his hands on her ribs—that slight distinction—she had felt it—of light and rain and rib and sky—he was holding the substance she had not yet become.
“I wasn’t at all sure you would come home, Evie,” her father is saying to her now.
He is small against the shelves. How could he have come to be so small? She stares at him—at his cramped and shrunken figure. She can see the maze of his mind. The frantic stumbling. The convolution of a Daedalus toward the minotaur.
Is that it? She looks down again at the scribbled page in her hand. And at last she can see clearly—how the words are chiseled and sparkling, they are beautiful words—but the lines as a whole do not make sense. The lines together have no meaning.
“It is perfect, Papa,” she says slowly. “It is everything you have wanted it to be.”
She folds the paper carefully, and he turns to look at her. His eyes are bright, almost luminous, as if he is seeing through her to the arctic glare of sunlight off of ice.
He drinks soup at afternoon dinner. A clear broth Maggie has chilled. His back curls over the bowl, his shoulders softly caved like the inside of a shell.
Eve keeps her gloves on through dinner. Her fingers stretch against the soft kid leather and she can feel a slight sweat in her palm.
Maggie glances at the gloves but says nothing.
After dinner, when the dishes have been washed and put away, Eve leans against the screen door in the kitchen while Maggie boils the linen in the double sink. Elizabeth sits in the rocker close to the fire, her body sloped into the right arm of the chair. The red firelight courses through the lines of her face. Her left eye has grown blurred as if there is a fog trapped in the socket. Eve looks out across the yard. She can see the birch trees down below the gravel walk—their leaves impossibly yellow and slight.
“I’ve invited Patrick Gerow for Sunday,” she says. “He’ll be arriving in the late afternoon.” She picks at a spot on the index finger of her glove.
Her grandmother doesn’t answer. Since the stroke she has lost the left half of her body, and it deflates in toward the center of her spine.
“How long’ll he stay?” Maggie asks.
“I’m not exactly sure. A while, I’d imagine.”
“A while one night? A while two weeks? How long would you say a while would be?”
“I’m not exactly sure.”
Eve studies her grandmother’s face. She remembers the glassy smoothness of the skin even as the old woman’s hair had grown white. She does not remember these lines being drawn. She does not remember what Jake said to her, if he said anything, when he set her on the bank—and it did not matter, she tells herself, now it does not matter at all.
She looks back through the screen out across the yard to the birch trees—the mad shiver of those small yellow leaves—and she feels suddenly that it has all become too much—her world has changed so drastically—perhaps it has always been changing, and she is only waking up to it now—change that is so tremendous—the impact of it—almost unlivable. What has she done?
Maggie is shaking the soap from her hands. She pulls the linen over the faucet and begins to squeeze it from one end. She does this slowly, methodically, twisting the soaked fabric. Water runs down her arms.
“He’s working for Coles, I hear,” Maggie says.
“What? Who?”
“That man. Gerow. He’s building houses for Coles.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to marry him, aren’t you?”
Elizabeth’s head snaps up. “Marry who?”
Maggie smiles, drying her hands on the dish towel. “Evie, old listener.
I’m talking to Evie.” She tucks the dish towel on the hook below the sink and walks over to the stove. With the fire iron she prods the dead ash and the embers.
“It won’t burn well,” Elizabeth says, her voice slightly broken and slow. “That kind of wood you’ve got in there. It makes poor heat. Too much sap in it to burn.”
“I already did,” Eve says.
Maggie glances up at her, then looks away. She sweeps up the spilled ash, then culls another log from the stock next to the stove.
“Oak this time,” she says loudly, close to Elizabeth’s ear. “We’ll burn the oak and see if it does more good.” She lays down the log in the fire across the other two.
Eve leaves the kitchen and climbs the stairs. Halfway to the first landing, she glances back toward the kitchen. She can see Maggie pass across the open door toward the sink. A moment later, she hears the sound of running water.
She slips back down the stairs along the narrow hallway to the library. She closes the door softly behind her, locates the book of the Sufi poet and thumbs quickly through the pages. She cannot find the gap, the place where she tore out that page a year ago. She flips through a second time, more slowly. She tracks the numbers at the bottom of each page until she finds the one that skips. She puts her fingers into the binding, under the thread, feeling for the seam that was torn.
Upstairs in her bedroom, she peels off the gloves. She pulls the ring off with them and puts it down behind the curtain tie on the windowsill. She does not unpack her trunk. She leaves the house and walks down the wagon path toward the river through the reek of fall leaves that have turned soft in the earth. She struggles to remember the woods that she knew as a child: the logic of clearings, the trip over stone walls, the sudden break out into the lower meadow. As a child, she had known the name of every flower. She had gathered buttercups, wild violets, blue flax. She remembers now that there was a cut through the trees away from the marked path that led down into that meadow. She senses that it might be somewhere east of where she is.
As she walks, she surrenders to what she has lost. Her mind drops away as her feet strike a rhythm against the frostbitten ground. She forgets everything except the meadow and realizes all at once that she is standing in the middle of it, the same field, only close to winter and unrecognizable, the tall grass crushed into itself.
She turns away sharply and walks down the cow path in the direction of the river. As she comes out onto the small beach, the boathouse is to her left—a slightly crooked shape that has sunk down on its pilings, its roof curved. She notices the lean window slits. Jake has boarded them carefully for the coming storms.
The sky is parched and blue, a gibbous moon. She digs her hands into the deep sockets of her coat and crosses the cowlicked mat of salt-meadow grass. She walks around the boathouse. She keeps a distance between herself and the unlatched door.
to be forsaken,
to be forsaken,
No, she did not burn that page, she remembers now. She cut it roughly from the book and put it somewhere. She put it away. Where? She cannot remember where. She thinks of all the places where she used to hide things as a child—the shelf under the stairs, the break in the plaster at the back of her closet, the attic. And how did it end? That poem. It did not end with forsaken, or did it? No, it must have ended somewhere else.
When
she comes back into the house, she unpacks the steamer trunk. She sets the books of Rilke and Rimbaud on the small bookshelf by the bed. She takes the postcards of Magritte and De Chirico, the small photographs of Montmartre, la Tour Eiffel, the quays. She sets them down into interlocking maps on the floor of her room.
She takes out several sheets of rice paper and six tubes of oil that have been flattened under the books. She takes the hand mirror off the bureau and goes upstairs to the attic. She sits under the eaves and unties her mind. She squeezes paint onto the hand mirror, thins it with the linseed oil, and spills the color out onto the paper. She draws her fingers through the blue.
She paints the yellow leaves. Their frantic shiver like a music straining on the branch. She paints her father’s face, her grandmother’s face, Maggie’s. She paints what she can remember of her mother’s face. She smudges the eyes until they are only a trembling—coins in the night. She paints a man walking through a desert who lies down in a mirage of water to be close to a woman he once loved. She paints until the attic is dark, and when the light is gone she mixes the colors together with her fingers and paints across her own face. The thinner burns. She lies down under the eaves. Across the room is a window: small, iron-framed, the night settled inside it.
CHAPTER 16
Jake
She meets him now in the form of a stranger, with glib words and a distance that tastes like grass. He comes home from East Beach in the late afternoon, his clothes hardened with gravel dust and sand. The sun bakes the cement through the cotton and leaves a gray stain on his skin. He maps the outlines of the grayness into continents. He scrubs them with a sponge and an extract of lemon oil until the water runs through him again and his body is as hollow as a globe. He sees her at the Point Church. Long gloves and a dress the color of eggshell. He scissors her face out of the background of Patrick Gerow and her father. He touches the chinks in her where the church light and air, the ebb and flow of hymns and prayers pass through. He notices how her face has begun to thin, dented shadows around her nose and under her eyes, a darkness in the hollow of her neck. The marks remind him of the slits his brother used to cut in gypsy moths. Wes would hold them fast between his fingers and slice tender windows in their wings.
She and her husband stay longer in the summers. They stay at Skirdagh, in the west wing of the house. Jake hears that Patrick Gerow is designing a small cluster of houses a mile north of the Almy place on Horseneck Road. He hears that, with Arthur Coles and Thomas Hicks, Patrick has begun to draw up the first-round plans for a new hotel on the site where Blackwood’s store used to be.
Eve comes down to the boathouse every other Sunday afternoon with a list of what they need fixed at the house: a gutter has come loose, a warped porch railing, a step by the back door needs to be replaced. Jake picks broken pieces out of what she says. He works to find order, an understanding, not of the words themselves but of the lack of inflection in her voice, the stony curtness that has come to inhabit her face. Her hardness does not mesh with what he felt in her that day on the sandflat, or what he felt when he saw her walking with her father on Horseneck: the strange curved longing her boots would leave along the tidal edge. Over time, however, he grows to expect it, and then what puzzles him is not her coolness but the fact that she comes. Summer after summer. Every other Sunday. She walks down from the big house with her list to find him. She knocks on the door and when he answers, she reads the list, then hands it to him with a summary thank-you and walks back up the hill.
Six days a week, from seven until four, he works on the summer cottages along East and West Beach. He works in the gathering heat, sorting through stones that are flat and the size of two hands. The sun is ruthless and pastes a maze of dust and heat and salt onto him, an irrevocable grit that will not wash out. He sets stone after stone with a trowel to make terraces that will lead down into tumbling gardens. When the wheelbarrow is empty, he fills it again. He rakes a hoe through the tray of gravel sand and water. He sees her face in the cement.
He lives through the summers in the boathouse. Other than to do the work he has been asked to do, he does not go up to Skirdagh, not to the library, not even to Maggie’s garden. He tracks the seasons by the migration of the birds. When the sanderlings disappear, he knows it is mid-June, and they have begun their journey to the Arctic. He dreams them as they mate among the ice floes and a sun that barely moves. When the osprey nestlings spill out of the dead tree in the marsh by Split Rock, he knows it is the end of July. The sun has begun to pull south again, hand over hand, along the prone shadow of the harbor. The moon jellies flood in with the red tide, and he can smell the dank weight of weed trapped between the causeway rocks and under sand.
When the first storms come in late August, he sits on the wooden floor of the boathouse and consumes the pages of the books he reads. He finds lines about sea wolves, blue mountains, and the blood of whales. He cuts them out of the book with his knife. Carefully. He takes only what he needs.
He hears from Maggie that Patrick Gerow wants a child. Maggie gives Eve warming teas and quarter cups of apple cider vinegar to stir the blood. She makes her egg yolks fried in an iron skillet to thicken her flesh. She gives her maple sap with nettle to get the seed to stick and tonics made of raspberry leaf and red clover flowers.
“She’s grown too cold for a child,” Maggie remarks to Jake one spring when they are out in the garden pulling asparagus. “These last few years, she’s grown so cold.”
Maggie plants asparagus with great distances between them, so they grow up, thin and solitary pillars through the earth. She moves through the rows and breaks the stalks low, close to the ground. She lays them down into her basket, braided heart to braided heart.
In the winter of 1937, the buffleheads and snow buntings arrive early. By late November, there is already a scab of young ice on the ocean surface, and the frost is a harsh-glistening skin on the grass. By January, the river and ponds are solid. The men and boys sweep the ice of snow. They build sledding chutes on the downhills and fly off the bank across the East Branch from the Drift Road to the Pine Hill side. Even the old rumrunners from the Shuckers Club come to skate. They start at Hixbridge, open their winter coats like sails, and let the northeast wind blow them all the way down to Gunning Island. The ice grows three inches thick on the telephone poles, and the wires sling down, overwhelmed by the weight.
That winter, Jake dreams of the house. Week after week, through that cold rare light, the same dream. He dreams it all the way into the spring of 1938. The mullein leafs, green shoots poke up through the cattails, and the swallows return, their boomerang wings wheel dark circles through his sleep.
He sees the dream sometimes even while he is awake, crossing the bridge on his way down John Reed Road to begin work on the summer homes. He will go down after the thaw to unboard the windows and take stock of leaks and damage, what needs to be repaired. In the dream, he is walking up the hill toward Skirdagh. He walks through Maggie’s garden past the hand plow and the flat-throat shank spade that she uses to turn the manure. He walks past the herring bones soaking with the shell marl in the barrel behind the woodshed, past the root cellar where his brother sits smoking on a stool underneath the overhang. He walks past Maggie’s wheelbarrow and a tremendous basket of eggs. They are unhatched—pale blue—with light brown hunks of land etched into their shells. He walks past thickets of wild rose, iris, and daffodil. Up ahead, the main house of Skirdagh shimmers. The roof, the walls, even the wraparound porch are elastic, rippling as if they move in a surreal, unstable heat. He can hear a sound coming toward him from a distance, a wind sound, rising like the hiss of lightning along electric wires. He looks up. Eve is standing in the middle window of the second floor, her hands mapping the pane from the inside as if she could dig through, and he remembers suddenly in his dream that he saw her this way once as a child, her hands routing the same slow and curious pattern through a window over and over again. He has almost reached the top of the hill when the
water breaks through the glass where she stands. She falls toward him, her body thrown like a wild bird to flight as the house sheds out of itself, crumbles, and runs into a river down the hill.
PART III
SUMMER
1938
CHAPTER 1
Ben Soule
August. They have garden parties every weekend at the stone house, children dressed in jelly bean colors running through the box-hedge maze. The old man naps during the day, and the laughter of the children clatters down the dark halls of his sleep.
To escape them, he dons the wings. They are nearly finished. He adds one or two feathers each week. Crow for seeing. Swan for grace. The frame fits easily across his back, the elastic band around each shoulder slightly loose from where he has shed some weight. He changes the bands. He cuts three slits in each and makes a buckle, so he can belt them more tightly depending on the barometer read of the day. He hops first. Hops and flaps and hops again to master the art of the takeoff. As he practices, he learns that a slight flap, then a hop, followed by a strong push of his arms toward the ground will give him that initial height he needs to catch the lowest current of wind.
At the stone house, they often have music. A swing band. A quartet. The shallow pluck of the stringed instruments grates on him. The family spends two full weeks at the house in mid-August, and the voices of the children build with the relentless heat, voices smearing like a rash across his skin. He prays for a storm. For sudden claps of thunder that will send the children squealing back indoors. He prays for gray days and black clouds piling out of the fog. He prays for wind. For a roar that will pull out the maze by its roots. That will shatter the blinding reds, yellows, purples, blues of the imported perennial gardens. The floral stench is overwhelming. A perfume that coats his food. Even the hardtack crackers taste like flowers.