“She did, did she? We’ll see about that,” he said grimly, and I caught a glimpse of an animal far different from the friendly shaggy brown bear he had always put me in mind of.
We’ll see indeed, but I can’t think how he’ll put this Humpty Dumpty back together again.
DECEMBER 25, 1899
My heart is so full that I must share my feelings in some way, even if only with a journal. Last night I was just putting the children to bed when there was a pounding on the door. I opened it to find Rob standing there with a silly grin on his face and a huge Christmas tree over his shoulder. Elisabeth was already asleep, but Francis’s eyes were as big as saucers.
Rob set up the tree and returned from his buggy with boxes of ornaments he said his family had collected and that his wife hadn’t bothered to take with her. I let Francis stay up to help us decorate it until he couldn’t hold his eyes open any longer. Rob picked him up and carried him to bed.
“Now for the important part,” he said, laughing, when we were in the sitting room once more. He went out to the buggy again and returned with some mysterious packages.
“Rob, you shouldn’t have!” I exclaimed.
“Ah, but I wanted to, you see. Christmas isn’t worth a damn except for children.” He put his hand under my chin and tipped my head back so that I had to look at him.
“You’re doing me a favor by lending me your family, you know,” he said gently.
“I don’t know what to say.” I felt helpless.
He smiled. “Then don’t say anything.” And off he went.
“Tee! Tee!” Elisabeth chortled happily this morning as she ran toward this glorious new decoration that had miraculously sprouted in the sitting room. She still has trouble with r’s.
Francis just stood rooted to the ground, gazing in wonder at the packages beneath. “Papa home?” he asked, and I realized with a wrench that in my loneliness I had talked to him perhaps more than I should.
“No, your papa isn’t home yet,” I said. “Most of this is from Uncle Rob and some from me.”
There were balls and dolls and stuffed animals and a toy drum and bright warm jackets. Esperanza had made bean bags in the shape of frogs, and I had made some new clothes and bought Francis a toy wooden ship and Elisabeth a kaleidoscope. The great success, however, was a rocking horse that Rob had made himself. Instead of rockers, it was suspended on heavy springs from a wooden frame. Francis discovered immediately that by shifting his weight back and forth he could make his horse gallop as fast as he liked, and I had a hard time prying him off it to eat Christmas dinner, which Rob shared with us. I cooked a stuffed goose, and we had yams and lima beans fresh from Esperanza’s garden and a peach pie from dried peaches with sugar and cinnamon.
Since the children had refused to lie down for their afternoon naps, they were exhausted early, and after eating some toast and milk they went to bed with hardly a murmur. Afterward Rob and I had coffee and brandy from a bottle he had brought.
“What a wonderful Christmas,” I sighed, thinking of the almost perfunctory exchanging of gifts David and I had done, with no warmth and no laughter.
He smiled. “It’s not over yet,” he said and handed me a small package.
I opened it and gasped as I saw a thin silver chain with a curiously wrought turquoise ornament on it. The turquoise glowed blue with green veins shooting through it.
“It reminded me of the color of your eyes,” he said.
I looked at him, stricken. “You know I can’t accept this,” I whispered in anguish, not caring to so much as contemplate what such a gift might mean.
“Yes you can,” he countered and fastened the chain around my neck. “This is because you so generously lent me your family.” He stood up then, mumbled, “Merry Christmas,” and was out the door before I could say anything. He had ridden over instead of driving the buggy, and I stood at the door listening to the dwindling sound of his galloping horse’s hooves and wishing he were still with me.
Chapter II
JANUARY 9, 1900
Of course in the end I didn’t quit my job with the Winters’s. I don’t know what Rob said to her, but Melanie apologized prettily for what she had said and offered the explanation that pain and frustration had prompted her outburst. Though I invited him to stop by if he wished, on New Year’s Eve there was no sign of Rob, and I hardly knew whether to be disappointed or relieved that I saw in the turn of the century by myself, though there are those who say that the century won’t turn until next year. Sometimes the necklace seems to burn on my breast like a brand.
Kate writes that she is very worried about Double and wants to know how I would feel if she came for a visit. “I’m sure you could use the company,” she wrote, “and the help as well, and if Double is thrown into the midst of a busy household with lots of work she may come out of her funk. If she stays here the way she is, I fear for her.”
It goes without saying that I wrote back that I would love to have her. Double and I have always had a real affection for each other, and I’m looking forward to seeing her. Besides, Kate may fear for Double, but I fear for myself and feel that I am on the edge of some fearful precipice that could be the undoing of the children as well as of myself.
JANUARY 14, 1900
An unseasonable hot spell in January arrives nearly every year in California, and yet every year it is a fresh surprise. I knew when I rose this morning and felt the deceptive softness of the early-morning air that by noon it would be ninety degrees with the sun blazing out of a cobalt sky. The house in its stand of enormous oaks is cool enough even in hot weather, but it seemed a shame to cower in the house when the beach would be such a welcome change for the children. Sheldon has been very nice about lending us his old buggy whenever we want it, and Nefertiti, the mare that Alex Winters has provided for my transportation, I do believe enjoys the surf as much as the children do.
I was just making some egg sandwiches when Rob unexpectedly arrived and announced that we were all going on a picnic in the hills.
“Won’t it be awfully hot?”
“Not where we’re going,” he said. “Put away that muck and bring bathing costumes and towels.”
The children were delighted, and it wasn’t long before we were clopping along up through Windfast Canyon. The rain had dutifully begun in early November, and now the open hillsides were lushly green, dotted with live oaks under which horses and cattle stood lazily swishing their tails. Francis and Elisabeth both laughed and pointed at the new little calves and foals frolicking in the green grass.
All at once as I looked around me everything seemed almost too much to bear: the children’s high spirits, Rob’s satisfied grin, the new little animals gamboling about, the aching beauty of the lush countryside. To my chagrin I found myself blinking back tears. Rob must have been watching me, because he reached over and squeezed my arm gently.
“I know how you feel.” He smiled. “I wish —” But he broke off then and I never found out what he wished.
We wound through the rolling hills and then turned off on a dirt track so little used that it had a line of high grass down the middle that bent beneath the buggy as we rolled over it.
“I used to come here as a boy,” Rob said reminiscently.
“It hasn’t changed any in all that time. I wish I could say the same for myself.”
I don’t know what I expected, but when we came around the bend in the road I drew a sharp breath of astonishment Down a rock face ran a small waterfall that fed a stream rippling across an open meadow of wild oats. On the far side, dappled there by the shade of a stand of magnificent live oaks and sycamores, lay a pool whose water spilled over a stone lip and disappeared down a narrow rocky draw. At the pool’s edge two does with their fawns were drinking. When they saw us, they stood poised for a long moment, their large ears strained to catch any sound we made. Rob pulled up the horse and the deer stood there yet a short time more before turning and bounding gracefully off into the trees, the white
patches under their tails bobbing easily through the shadows, the fawns bouncing like rubber balls behind.
Rob sighed. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”
Francis, unimpressed by the deer, had lost no time clambering down from the buggy and running happily toward the stream.
“Francis!” I called. “Take off your shoes!” And I climbed down myself to see to it that he didn’t fall in.
It wasn’t long before we were all wading barefoot in the clear cold water. Rob helped me put on the children’s bathing costumes and soon Elisabeth was making a mud castle of sorts while Francis chased minnows in the water, which didn’t even reach his knees. The sunlight glittered on his red-gold head, and I remembered when his father and I, not all that much older than Francis, had fallen into the pond behind the Bedfords’ orchard. My, did we catch it when we came home drenched and muddy and bedraggled. I looked at Rob standing laughing in the water in his shirtsleeves, his trousers rolled up to his knees, and the adult David, so neat and self-contained, seemed very dim and far away indeed. I wondered briefly what he was doing and then forgot him entirely, I’m sorry to admit.
When it became apparent that the children could come to no harm in the shallow water, Rob and I unloaded the buggy in the shade near the pool and unhitched and hobbled the horse, who promptly put his head down and began to graze. Rob put a bottle of white wine and a large jar of lemonade in the stream to cool, and then we each went behind the buggy to change into bathing costumes that I for one found more cumbersome by far than the light muslin dress I had worn corsetless for the picnic.
“For heaven’s sake, Jan, at least take off those ridiculous stockings,” Rob said, laughing. “There’s no one to see you here, and God knows the children won’t care.”
Since the bloomers of the bathing costume came below my knees, I guessed that he wouldn’t see much more of me than he had when I had raised my skirts to wade, and I took off the heavy stockings with relief. Soon we were splashing about the pool for all the world like a couple of children ourselves. During all those childhood summers at Marblehead I had learned to swim strongly, even if awkwardly, and when Rob dived off an overhanging branch of an oak tree, I surprised him by following, jumping feet first. Afterward we sat in the welcome hot sun and watched the children playing while we dried off. By the time we had unpacked the picnic, we were all famished.
Rob had done himself proud. There was more fried chicken than we could possibly have eaten, enough so that everyone could have his favorite pieces. There was potato salad and sweet pickles and stuffed eggs and tostadas — tortillas fried in hot oil until they were brown and crispy — and buttery avocados, fresh homemade bread he had bought in Old Town, and enormous oranges and a lemon pie one of his patients had given him. Rob and I split the wine between us, and the children drank the lemonade. Francis and Rob made faces at each other, and after lunch Rob taught him to play Scissors-Paper-Rock.
In the end, Elisabeth fell asleep and I put her in the shade on a blanket. Francis refused to take a nap and went back to chasing minnows. I sat with my back against a tree and idly dabbled a twig in the water of the pool. Completely unselfconsciously, Rob lay down then with his head in my lap and closed his eyes.
“Wake me if I snore,” he said lazily and was soon fast asleep.
Despite the turmoil of my emotions, the unseasonal heat of the day, the generous meal, and Rob’s example all conspired to make me, too, nod and jerk and at last sleep soundly even in that uncomfortable position. I have no idea how long I slept, but when I woke it was to find him lying on his side, his head propped up on one elbow, watching me. I stretched and groaned feelingly, for I was both stiff and sore.
“I had the better of it, didn’t I?” he said. “You should have thrown me off and made yourself comfortable.”
Our eyes locked. “Yes, I should have,” I replied, “but it’s too late now, isn’t it?”
His eyes dropped and he twiddled a sprig of wild oats between his fingers. “Yes, it is,” he said in a tone so low I could barely hear him. “God help us both, it is.” He looked at me once more and then rose to his feet. “Come, my love,” he said lightly, “it’s time to go.”
It was then and only then that I realized that while Elisabeth was back to her mud edifices, Francis was nowhere in sight Still unconcerned, I called him while I helped Rob gather up the picnic things.
“Blast the child,” I exclaimed. “I told him not to lose sight of us.”
Rob was philosophical. “You take the streambed below us and I’ll climb the rocks where the falls are. He can’t be far.”
I stepped gingerly down over the rocks in the narrow little draw below the pool expecting to see his red-gold head at any moment. I even rehearsed what I was going to say to him and decided that a brisk slap on his bottom would be in order. The draw opened out onto another meadow, much smaller than the one above, and I could hear the splashing of water falling some distance from over beyond the thick oak wood that bounded the far edge of the meadow.
It wasn’t until I had crossed the meadow and was making my way among the trees that a feeling of dread came over me. The oaks were small second growth that had stunted each other by their closeness and formed a thicket through which a man on a horse could never have passed. The air was still and redolent of oak-leaf mold. A thin singing of unseen insects permeated the shaded air splashed only occasionally by shafts of sunlight. If this wooded area was large, Francis could be lost for days, I thought in sudden panic, and shouted his name over and over.
When at last I arrived where the water was falling, I came upon the rock edge so suddenly that I was startled. I looked down and saw that the water dropped sheer for thirty feet, then hit a projecting sloping shelf of rock, breaking the falling stream into a frothing spray of shattered drops that splashed thickly like a heavy rain into a shaded pool below. What if, like me, Francis had come suddenly upon this lip of rock and, losing his footing, had plunged down to be broken on that cruel rock shelf? Bodies sank, I remembered reading somewhere, and only surfaced later when corruption had set in. Did the bright red-gold head lie now in the darkness of that shaded pool? I peered down into the black depths of the pool below as if by sheer willpower I could see the bottom. An icy knowing gripped my mind: I knew Francis was there, his blue eyes wide open and staring sightlessly into the dark water, his mouth open in a soundless scream.
God had seen fit to punish me for the unfaithfulness I had been contemplating. I had done nothing, but my thoughts were hovering around a dangerous discovery. Was I indeed a Bathsheba hoping that my Uriah would perish in the war? Until that very instant, I swear, the thought had never occurred to me, but once recognized I could not banish it but must stand there listening to that dreadful splashing, knowing at last that I wished heartily David would never return. At Christmas and again today when Rob had stood laughing in the stream with Francis, I had caught a glimpse of everything that had been denied me, of love freely given, of uncritical affection, of warmth and caring and laughter and a trusting interdependence that I had never known with my husband.
I see now that David married me because Stephen was getting married, he tortured me with those ridiculous dinners because he thought it might help him become an admiral, he touched my body only because doing so gave him a relief as simple as going to the bathroom, and he gave me children he would never love only to ensure his own immortality. I was never anything for him but a convenience and often not even that. What I really was all those years, I thought, was an unpaid servant. After David returns I will still be scrubbing floors and dirty diapers with nothing more romantic in the offing than his furtive early-morning encounters, and I wonder if I can stand it.
I have no idea how long I stood there looking down into that dreadful pool. For two cents then I would have jumped myself, for how would I live with the conviction that God had punished me through my small son, who had been made to suffer for my sin? I admitted to myself then as I admit to myself now what that sin is, an
d for penance I must make myself deny it I wish with all my heart that it had been Rob Connors, not David Hand, to whom I pledged myself. God forgive me, I must see to it that Rob and I are never alone together, for I am afraid of what I might say or do.
JANUARY 15, 1900
I couldn’t bring myself to finish this account last night. I was too tired and too distraught.
As I stood helplessly watching the waterfall and suffocating with guilt, I heard a distant shout from behind that brought me to my senses. I must never allow Rob to know what I was thinking, for it is unfair to burden him with my transgressions. I turned and made my way back through the tangled growth.
As long as I live I shall never forget the sight of Rob striding across that small sunlit meadow with Francis perched triumphantly on his shoulders, the boy’s red-gold hair bright in the hot light striking it from above. They were both laughing, and I took it as a providential sign that admission of my sin had brought my son back to me. I too laughed then and ran toward them. As we met, Rob let go of the boy’s legs, leaving him to hold on as he might, and put his arms around me and held me tight, his cheek against mine. How can I speak of the happiness I felt then, the happiness I must for the sake of all of us deny?
“Mama! Mama!” Francis cried. “I want to play hide and seek too! Will you hug me when you find me?”
“Of course I will, darling!” I reached up and took him from Rob’s shoulders and hugged him fiercely, my eyes stinging. “Of course I’ll hug you.”
When we returned to the pool and the other meadow, Elisabeth was still placidly patting the wet mud with her pudgy hands. Rob and I looked at each other and broke out laughing again, the slightest thing setting us off into renewed paroxysms. I think our relief at finding Francis, who had fallen asleep behind a tree near the first little waterfall, made us somewhat hysterical. I could just imagine the cold scornful look on David’s face if I had had to admit to him that I had lost his son.
As I write this I can still feel the tender, slightly scratchy touch of Rob’s cheek against mine … Please God, help me to be strong.
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