Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  I miss her, but I also have a strange, vengeful urge to show her, though show her what exactly I couldn’t say. I suppose I want her to feel regret, to suffer as I am, even though I also want to be the one to spare her from all suffering. Does that make any sense?

  Caleb says to give it time, which is all I can do for now anyway.

  Wallace seems to be well enough. His letters and his doctor say so, but I still think he’s on the fragile side. I called last week. It seems to me he’s been squeezed out and dried like a mushroom and is now reconstituting himself with fresh life. He said the world seems almost too clear to him now that he’s not drinking, too bright, like sunlight on snow. He also said he’s begun to paint again. I wondered where he was getting money for supplies, but the doctor told me Wallace’s “patron” had set aside an additional allowance just for that. Barclay will never be redeemed in my eyes, but I can acknowledge this one kindness. Wallace feels so guilty, by the way, and cried on the telephone and told me he feels as though he’d sold you. I assured him he hadn’t, that no one sold anyone.

  I am sorry for what I said. It was an odd (and small) consolation to hear there is an attraction between you and Barclay. I can understand, after my own puny, ill-fated romance, how attraction can lead us astray.

  But if you don’t want a baby, you must do everything in your power to avoid it. I’m no expert on the subject, but I think you were right to use the word “snare” in your letter. I know you believe Barclay loves you in his way, but he is also trying to break you. The two things might be the same for him. Nothing that has happened so far can’t be escaped or undone, but if you had a baby I doubt you would find it in yourself to abandon it as we were abandoned. I hope you will leave Barclay one day and find your way back to your own life. Please, Marian. Don’t give in.

  I don’t know if I’m as useful as a wing, but I will always do what I can for you if you ask. Even if you don’t ask, I will still try my best.

  Yours,

  Jamie

  * * *

  —

  The man at the front desk of the Edinburgh hotel from which Mr. and Mrs. Macqueen had recently departed sighed when he saw the letter. Forwarding service had been requested, and so the letter went into a pouch with a few other straggling communications and was addressed to Mr. Barclay Macqueen and sent off to America.

  Montana

  December 1931–January 1932

  Sadler met Marian and Barclay at the Kalispell depot in the elegant black Pierce-Arrow. “You’ve had a long journey,” he said, opening the back door for Marian, who didn’t bother to concur.

  Another man, a Salish who worked at Bannockburn, followed behind in a truck with their luggage. Marian slept through the drive, willfully indifferent to the conversation of the men or the first glimpse of her new home. Barclay had to shake her awake. For a moment she thought she was back in the Scottish Highlands. She saw snow, mountains, a square, dignified, symmetrical house made from gray stone, roofed in slate.

  Barclay’s mother and his sister, Kate, were standing on the front steps between two enormous stone urns. Kate, in riding boots and sheepskin jacket and broad-brimmed hat, shook Marian’s hand. At their wedding, she’d said, “He won’t be talked out of it. I’ve tried.”

  “I’ve tried, too,” Marian had replied.

  Kate had scowled, said, “I’m sure.”

  Barclay’s mother, Mother Macqueen, as she wished to be called, wore a brown dress and heavy shawl. A silver crucifix dangled nearly to her waist. Her gray hair was bound in two thick braids looped back up on themselves, and her face was pleated with long, delicate wrinkles. She surprised Marian by embracing her and patting her back as though offering reassurance to a child. “You are very welcome here,” she said in a low murmur. Her accent was an odd mix of Salish and French.

  Marian had not been prepared for such a warm greeting, for warmth at all. Barclay had said little about his mother. She wondered if Mother Macqueen was remembering being a bride, being taken under the auspices of Barclay’s father, encompassed by his whiteness and wealth.

  Mother Macqueen was holding her hands and gazing into her face. “You are a blessing,” she said.

  Gently, Barclay separated them. “Come inside, Marian,” he said.

  Life as a wife began.

  Marian had trouble finding any way to be useful. There was a landing strip on the ranch, but the Stearman was back in Missoula. She asked when she might go and get the plane, but Barclay put her off with vague admonishments about settling in, finding her place, enjoying being a newlywed. She told herself she needed to wait, to make the best of things, and eventually he would relax his vigilance. At least on the ranch she needn’t wear silk dresses.

  A Salish girl did the dusting and sweeping and laundry, one in a long succession of girls who had been educated, like Mother Macqueen, in a convent school where the French-speaking nuns emphasized domestic skills and the Bible’s most frightening pronouncements and tried to drive the nativeness out of their charges. Mother Macqueen had graduated with an esoteric set of beliefs, partly of her own concoction, that Barclay said had both enchanted and deranged his father: She perceived life as a continuous storm of divine wrath and celestial mercy, human beings blown one way and then the other by competing gusts on which angels and devils flew like bats.

  An older Scottish woman did the cooking. A gang of men worked the cattle and cared for the horses and mended the fences. Kate worked with the men, but any attempts Marian made to help were rebuffed. She had the sense Barclay had forbidden anyone to allow her to work, leaving her with nothing to do but wander aimlessly around the ranch. She suspected he was trying to bore her into having a baby.

  “What are you doing today?” she asked Kate one morning when she contrived to meet her on horseback.

  Kate’s cheeks were flushed with cold. “Mending fences.”

  “I could lend a hand.”

  “No, we just want to get on with it.” She rode off, her horse’s hoofbeats muffled by snow.

  * * *

  —

  Just after the new year, the parcel of held mail arrived from the hotel in Edinburgh.

  In their bedroom, Barclay read Jamie’s letter aloud in a furious, tremulous voice: “ ‘I hope you will leave Barclay one day and find your way back to your own life. Please, Marian. Don’t give in.’ ” He waved the pages at her. “Horseshit. Meddling horseshit.”

  “I told you I didn’t want a baby,” she said feebly.

  “You don’t mean it.”

  “I do. What can I say to make you believe I know my own mind?”

  “Don’t you care what I want?”

  “Is what you want for me to be miserable?”

  “You won’t be. You’ll see—you’ll love the baby. And it’s your duty to give me children. You’re my wife. Won’t it make you happy to do your duty?”

  “Never,” she said, loudly, getting louder. “Never ever.”

  He clamped a hand over her mouth. His mother and Kate were in the house. The Salish girl was somewhere. The cook was in the kitchen. “I could make you,” he said. They blazed at each other. She pushed his wrist away.

  “You can’t make me,” she said, quietly, but with all the force she could muster.

  “I can take away your—” He formed a ring with his thumb and forefinger to signify her diaphragm. “Your thing. I have rights.”

  She thought of Mrs. Wu, what Dolly’s girls had said: a little bit too much dragon smoke, a bit of a scrape. She thought she could walk to Missoula if she needed to, over the mountains.

  “You can’t make me,” she repeated. “I would find a way.”

  He looked alarmed, then disgusted. “Who are you?” he said, so differently from how he’d ever said it before.

  “Who I’ve always been.”

  He shook his head. “No.
You’ve changed.”

  “Then you’re the one who’s changed me. Blame yourself.”

  * * *

  —

  Just before dawn, a car horn. Faint but insistent, growing louder. It was not the volume but the out-of-placeness that perforated Marian’s dream. She stood at the window in her nightgown. The Pierce-Arrow was weaving through the early gloom up the long ranch road. Sometimes the horn keened for long, sustained seconds; sometimes it was only half a bleat.

  Downstairs, Kate was already out on the porch, dressed, waiting.

  “What’s wrong?” Marian said, tying the belt of her wool robe. “Why is he doing that?” The car was drawing near, and she wasn’t sure whether Barclay would stop at the house or go careening past.

  “He’s probably drunk,” Kate said.

  “He doesn’t drink.”

  “Not often.”

  “Not ever!” When Kate didn’t respond, Marian added feebly, “He told me not ever.”

  The car slewed to a stop. Before Barclay had even opened his door, Marian could hear him bellowing his sister’s name. “Kate! Kate!” He stumbled out. “Kate!”

  Kate went to meet him, and he lurched to hug her. The force of him made her stagger. He was hatless. His hair stood up in tufts and bunches. “Kate!” he said again, in a choked voice.

  She steered him up the steps. He stared at Marian as he passed, leaning against Kate, reeking of booze, lips parted as though he were about to say something. He seemed less like an ordinary drunk and more like someone maddened by a terrible ordeal. Inside, his mother was knitting beside the massive stone fireplace. Without slowing her work, Mother Macqueen shot Marian a hard glare. “It’s the devil that catches him.”

  “He catches his own self,” Kate said. She was leading Barclay away from the stairs, toward the back of the house.

  Marian followed. “Where are you taking him?”

  “To the guest room. To sleep.”

  “He should be in our room.”

  “No, this is better. He’ll be sick. It’ll be easier for me if he’s down here.”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  Barclay craned his head over Kate’s shoulder to look uncertainly at Marian.

  “Now you want to take care of him?” Kate said. “You choose your moments.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “Be my guest, then. Help me get him up there.”

  One on each side, they heaved him up the stairs. On the landing, breathlessly, Kate said, “I’ve never heard you call him your husband.”

  “Well, he is.” Already Marian had begun to regret her flash of possessiveness. Barclay stank. He tripped over his own feet. She should have let him stew downstairs under his sister’s ministrations. But they got him into the bedroom and flopped him facedown onto the bed, his feet hanging off the side. Marian said, “He drove from Kalispell like this?”

  “From somewhere.”

  “It’s a miracle he made it.”

  “He always gets home.” Kate picked at the laces of one of Barclay’s muddy shoes.

  Marian pulled off the other shoe. “He’s done this before?”

  “Once a year maybe. It’s always the same. I think somehow he manages not to let the drink fully hit him until he’s on the ranch road.”

  Marian understood why Kate had been already dressed and outside. “You knew he’d gone drinking.”

  “I suspected. I’ve been wrong before, waited up all night only for him to stroll in fresh as a daisy.” She caught Marian’s eye. “Off whoring.”

  “If you’re trying to shock me, remember I met him in a brothel.”

  “How could I forget? In that case, do you think you can manage to undress him? He’ll be sick before long. You need something for it.” From beside the fireplace she took a tin bucket full of kindling, dumped it out into the grate. “This’ll do.” She set the bucket beside the bed.

  “We had an argument.”

  “Let’s roll him over.” They took Barclay by the ankles and tugged him so he lay longways on the bed, then rolled him onto his back. “Oh, there he goes. Get the bucket.” Barclay had begun to retch. Kate hauled him upright by the lapels just in time for Marian to catch, with the bucket, a gush of what seemed to be unadulterated whiskey. “Oh good, he’s made himself into a still,” Kate said.

  When Kate was gone, Marian took the bucket to the bathroom and emptied it before she tried to undress him. His trousers were easy enough, as were his socks, but he’d passed back into lumpen insensibility and she couldn’t get him out of his coat. This proved a blessing a minute later when she needed to haul him up as Kate had, by the lapels, so he could vomit again. When he’d finished, she stripped off his coat, waistcoat, and shirt, leaving him in his drawers. She pushed him onto his side, folded the blankets over him, emptied the bucket, curled up beside him under a quilt.

  For some hours, they dozed. He woke a few times to heave, though there seemed to be nothing left in him but pale green foam. When she woke to find him staring at her, she couldn’t guess the time. The sky was gray and heavy. “I wouldn’t have expected this,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “Expected what?”

  “That you’d tend to me.”

  “I didn’t like that you were calling for Kate.”

  “I’d have thought you’d have been relieved.”

  “You weren’t even out of the car and you were wailing for her over and over. Do you remember?”

  “I was desperate.”

  “For Kate?”

  “For comfort, I think. I get a feeling sometimes, like something terrible is chasing me, getting closer. I felt that way driving back. If I’d known you’d take care of me, I would have called for you, not Kate.” He fell quiet, and she wondered if he was asleep until he said, “You torment me, Marian. You do.”

  She considered for a minute, said, “I don’t see how. You’re the one with all the power.”

  “No, I’m not. I never have been.”

  She didn’t want to spell out for him all the means he had for controlling her, all the ways she’d already yielded. “I didn’t think you ever drank.”

  “Not often.” His eyes were closed. “I drank after I first met you. That was the worst time. I went upstairs with Desirée, but she wasn’t you, so I didn’t want her. She tried, but I couldn’t do anything. I went out to the car—remember it was snowing that night? I’d driven myself, and I got stuck trying to drive away, so I got out and pushed. Of course I slipped and fell and knocked my face on the bumper. By that point I was in such a state I couldn’t do anything but go off downtown and find a saloon. I was plenty cold and wet by the time I got there. I started drinking, and I sat and thought about why you’d gotten under my skin with that one look. Why you, when I see so many girls? I could have so many girls.” He glanced at her, closed his eyes again. “When I saw you, I’d thought I could have you right then—I would have paid any price. But when it turned out I couldn’t, I found I was…I suppose I was devastated. Beyond all reason. I do know I’m stubborn. I know I like having my own way too much, but knowing didn’t help. So I decided the problem had to be you, specifically you.

  “Usually before when I’d been drunk I’d been able to get to Kate. Or Sadler. Or someone’s been around to help, but that time I was all alone and all I could think about was how I might never have you. And there were other things that show up when I get this way. Old darkness. It wasn’t only you, but you’d brought it on. And there was too much snow for me to get anywhere, not out of Missoula, let alone to the ranch. I went walking around town—I don’t know what I thought I was looking for, but I kept stumbling into snowdrifts. I started thinking about how people say it’s not so bad to freeze to death because they say it’s just like falling asleep. So I walked down to the riverbank and found a nice deep snowbank, and I dug a little grave
for myself and lay down in it. I was so drunk I didn’t even notice the cold, and I was so tired and so relieved to be somewhere quiet that I could easily have drifted off—I was drifting off—and then I happened to think, what if I could have you? Not buy you but earn you, persuade you. It wasn’t so impossible. It actually seemed simple. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Obviously you were too young—I would have to wait a while—but I thought I shouldn’t be hasty in killing myself. I could always do that later.”

  He stopped speaking. She wondered if he’d meant his last words. She’d considered his death before, even hoped for it. She imagined she might feel relief. Or she might feel oppressive guilt. Either would be bearable; both together would not.

  “You didn’t wait long enough. I was still too young.”

  “If I had waited, would things be different?”

  She pitied him for the hope in his voice, as though the past could be altered. “Yes, but I don’t know if they’d be better.”

  He turned onto his side, facing her. “You were the one who pushed to go to bed. You didn’t think you were too young.”

  “I don’t mean when we went to bed. I mean when you sent Trout and the plane. I was too young to understand the bargain.”

  She thought he might be angry, but under the covers he took her hand. “I didn’t mean it as a bargain. I meant it as a gift.”

  She wove her fingers through his. “No, you didn’t.”

  “You don’t think things might still change? With a baby?”

  “Not the way you want them to.”

  “You didn’t really need me. You could have run away and found some other way to fly, if you’d really wanted to.”

  “Would you have let me go?”

  A knock at the door. Mother Macqueen came in with a teapot in a knitted cozy and one cup and saucer on a tray. She set the tray on Barclay’s nightstand, bent to pour.

  They sat up against the pillows. Ignoring Marian, Mother handed Barclay the cup of tea. She rested her hand on the hummock of his legs, said, “Don’t give yourself to the devil.”