by Tom Murphy
Kate was a joy and a revelation, and the more time Lily spent with the child, the more new and delightful things Lily learned about her daughter and herself. Not, thank heaven, that Kate was perfect. Far from it. Lily doubted that she could have dealt with perfection, so far from perfect was her image of herself. Like every child in the world, there was mischief in Kate Malone, and sometimes a fit of sulking, and sometimes tears. But for all that, Kate was sunshine and rainbows and all bright magical things, a good child at heart and generous, kind to the Baker children, whom she still considered her brother and sister, even accepting Lily as her true blood mother. This had come easily to Kate after the first adjustment and Lily thanked the angels that she hadn’t waited longer to break the news.
The ranch was pulling itself up from the wreckage of the drought and the fire faster than Lily had dared to hope. Their biggest problem now was a shortage of help, for the lure of gold had never dimmed, and many a good farmer had emigrated, not to farm the land but to sift the fickle rivers of the north and scratch in the unforgiving high Sierra. Lily had a plan, and soon would put it to the test: she wanted to import entire families of farmers, to pay for their moving on their signed assurance that they would settle on her land and farm it for a stated length of time. It seemed fair, and Fred Baker was enthusiastic. The next autumn might allow him the leisure to go recruiting in the Midwestern states.
In the meantime, the ranch buzzed and crackled with activity. The new reservoir was surveyed and dug and lined. Lily and Fred looked at its filling as at a miracle. It was set in a sort of nest between three hills, and from a fourth, higher hill they could look down on it as an object of beauty under whose rippling, festive surface lived the potential to save them from another drought.
Between Kate and the ranch’s endless demands on her time, Lily scarcely had a moment to herself, and this, she soon realized, was a blessing. The days were long and busy and physically tiring. She hardly ever looked in the mirror, but for a few seconds in the morning while sweeping the long red-gold hair into a functional chignon. And she hardly ever thought of Sophie’s words, intended though they undoubtedly had been, to be prophetic: “You could be anything, Lily, you could be a queen.” Poor Sophie! Kind Sophie. Sophie had meant well, but Sophie’s dreams were of silk and glory, and Lily had worn silk and suffered, and for glory she cared not a pin.
Yet still Lily wondered, sometimes in the quiet of her white-painted bedroom just before sleep came, if ever she would meet a man and truly love him. It had been—how long?—months now since Stanford’s last visit, and Lily, knowing him as she did, was certain he’d found consolation elsewhere. And more power to him, she thought, for hasn’t he been a good and honest friend, better, in some ways, than Fergy? If Lily could have loved Stanford, she would have been glad to. But what was not, was not. Pigs can’t fly, and they had better get used to that, and live their lives as best they can, wingless. Sometimes, creeping out of some deep corner of her brain with the practiced stealth of a bandit, would come her old daydream, taking her unaware, quick and painful. In a wink she’d be a girl again, arranging flowers for the Wallingfords’ dining table in the mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York. And then the big mahogany door would open and a young blond god would look in on her and smile, asking his courteous way to the library, and move on, barely seeing the girl, and surely never realizing that by this simple act of misdirection he had changed her young life unalterably.
When the dream came, which was mercifully seldom these days, Lily knew from practice just how to deal with it.
She would get up from whatever she was doing, even if she was half-asleep in her bed. She would get up and go to Kate, wherever the child was, and give the girl a kiss. For Kate was a dream, too, and so much better than the other for being real and warm and right at hand. Yet the blond young man in her dream would not stay buried. Someday, Lily told herself rather grimly, some fine day, maybe when I am old and gray and a grandmother, he’ll simply go away and never come back, and I’ll forget all about him!
Lily told herself these things, but she never quite believed them.
The clipper Anne Wallach was brand new and tuned to set records. Just looking at her for the first time made Brooks feel better about his voyage, about his prospects for the future. There she sat at Pier Nine, her paint green and shiny as emeralds, white trim and varnished decks glittering in the sunlight, a proud golden lady on her bowsprit.
And now, six weeks out of New York, the Anne Wallach more than justified his fondest expectations. She cut through the sea like a knife through warm butter. The crew and their officers had pride and great skill, and the six passengers were a congenial lot, although Brooks still found that congeniality did not come easily to him. The one true luxury he had allowed himself in his otherwise Spartan luggage was books. He had brought literally hundreds of them and found the voyage ideal for continuing his studies.
How fine it was to sit on the fresh-stoned deck in the vibrating blue of a tropical afternoon reading histories of the West, or the latest English novels, or refreshing his rusty French out of Molière! The easy rhythms of the clipper as she sliced through the sea were restful to him, soothing. Sometimes it almost seemed as though they’d sailed into a bright new world where there were no wars, no death, no ravaged love to linger like a cancer in his heart. Each day, though in many ways the same as the day past and the days to come, came to Brooks Chaffee fresh-wrapped in expectations like some childhood surprise in bright crisp paper waiting under the Christmas tree. Even his game knee felt better. Time and again he walked the decks, circling and circling until he feared the passengers and crew might think him daft, walking slowly at first, and with his cane, but growing stronger and putting more and more will into it, now making the full circuit with no help from the stick, touching the handrail sometimes, but more for reassurance than from any physical need, now able to walk the ship from stem to stern and back six times, now eight, now an even dozen!
What a small victory, and yet how large it loomed! The knee joint was fused, almost rigid, it would never flex properly, and it hurt. But he had conquered it. Now he was walking regularly, up and down the steep-cut gangways and ladders, pacing the deck, all without the cane. Willpower. Brooks could smile at his folly now, to think what a very deep swamp of self-pity he had gotten himself into in those dreadful first days after coming back to New York, after finding out about Caroline.
Caroline!
There, he could think it, say it, even say it aloud, run her name through his memory without leaving bloody tracks. Oh, for sure, his knee would always be stiff. And the memory of her would ever be burnt into his soul with a searing flame. Caroline would never lose her dread power to wound Brooks Chaffee in the place where every young man is most vulnerable, in the very core and center of his heart.
The knee would always be stiff, and yet he could circle the deck with it, smiling cordially above his pain, and more than a little drunk with pride at carrying it off.
How stiff, then, would his heart be, and for how long? What merry female eyes, what red smile, what laugh or whisper, what soft lips and silken body would come to him and be believed?
What woman could he trust, much less love? Could he ever love again, who had loved so very deeply, only to be wounded deeper still? These were the questions, unanswerable questions, that Brooks Chaffee asked himself as he walked and walked around and around the decks of the clipper Anne Wallach, smiling a thin little smile. What a bloody miracle it was that there were no women on board!
So Brooks read, and walked the deck, and smiled his little smile.
You wouldn’t call it good luck. As he inched away from his despair, Brooks developed an inclination he had never known before: he was no longer content merely to glide through his life as he always had done. Now he thought, hard, and analyzed every action before taking it. You wouldn’t call it luck, he thought. Luck would be having Caroline still, or somehow having the memory of her untarnished. Luck would be having Ne
ddy back, and being able to bend your knee like a normal man. But still and all, how many men with shattered lives got a chance to recreate their lives in a new place, with plenty of money, with the backing of a powerful family? Maybe taking this ship to California was taking a coward’s path away from his troubles, away, for that matter, from the Union’s troubles, too.
There was luck in simply being able to do it.
The clipper Anne Wallach raced down the coast of South America, rounded the Horn in record time, and looked to be fair along the way to setting a quicker time than Flying Cloud’s famous eighty-nine days. Even the sea itself seemed to conspire to help them: they hadn’t hit a major storm. For the first time in many months Brooks Chaffee felt the small, quivering, unmistakable twitching of hope. And for the first time since Antietam he thought it might—might just barely!—be possible for him to have a future.
He stood at the slender bow of the clipper and followed the gaze of the proud golden girl. The bow wave curled below him. Somewhere in the mist a hundred miles to his right was Valparaiso, a town he’d never see. And ahead! Ahead was the future, obscured by mists more dense than ever hid the coast of Chile, but unmistakably out there, north, in the golden land called California, waiting. And how many other foolish young men have carried this same shopworn little dream to this same, far place, and seen it turn to—what? To mud? To gold? To death itself?
Well, there was no denying this: whatever his future was, it would have to go some to be sadder than his past.
On the highest hilltop on the ranch, six miles back from the main house, there was a spot more dear to Lily than anyplace else on earth.
The hill was high, indeed, so high that even the most surefooted of her horses had his work cut out for him climbing the thing. But at the very top itself, for reasons best known to God or nature, the hill flattened and made a kind of small tabletop not half an acre from end to end, and roughly square, with wild grass and rounded rocks to sit on, and one twisted old pine that was a perfect natural tethering place for the horses.
From Lily’s Hill, as Fred Baker and Kate had begun to call it, the other, lesser hills tumbled down to the ranch house, the barns, the small perfect circle of the new reservoir, to the sea beyond.
It was always quiet here, but for the wind’s music and bird calls, and on a clear day you could see the tiny ivory-colored sails of great oceangoing clippers moving inch by inch across the view like little toys in a child’s dream of nautical adventures. They came for picnics now, nearly every fair Sunday, Lily and Kate alone sometimes, and often with the Bakers.
More and more, Lily found herself riding there alone at odd moments, for the hilltop was a peaceful place, and being there seemed to help her put the ever-more-busy, ever-more-complicated world into focus.
The hilltop soothed Lily, and brought her peace, and she had come here alone on this fine blue Thursday in the late August of 1864.
Somewhere back East, Lily knew, in some other bright field, on some other fine hill, young men in blue were shooting at young men in gray, gray rags if the newspapers were to be believed, and blood was spilling, fateful things were happening. In smoky rooms back East, fat men with nervous eyes were plotting to run Frémont against Lincoln in the coming election, and across the bay, said the Chronicle, all of fashionable San Francisco was enthralled at the prospect of a concert at the new opera house, at which the ladies would be allowed to wear only red, white, or blue. And that, Lily thought, was just how the aristocracy of California viewed the great war: as another chance to primp and parade their wealth, and to swagger safe patriotism at a distance.
Yet high on Lily’s Hill all was at peace. The lightest possible breeze whispered through the grass and rippled the surface of the new reservoir. Her pet horse, Pedro, grazed happily, untethered, on the ripening straw, and the blue sky soared all the way to China with never a cloud to weight it down. Lily sat on a smooth, rounded rock, comfortable in the riding costume she had designed and sewn for herself: an old gingham dress with its wide skirt slit into trousers. She rode long and hard these days, rode astride like a gaucho, and hardly cared for appearances out here, in her own domain—and hadn’t that crazy Amelia Bloomer done it all years ago, and in public, crusading for rights in her oddly shaped knickers? Lily played with a twig and looked out to sea.
There was one slender clipper far out at sea, not hugging the coast the way clippers usually did. How far away it seemed, in time as well as distance! And where was it going, and who was on it? The easy, idle, unanswerable questions slipped off her consciousness the way raindrops roll down a windowpane.
The stillness was palpable. Only the wind moved, its murmur blending with the occasional muffled chomping of the horse. A hawk circled overhead, its wings seeming motionless, riding the wind. From far down the valley there came a faint, persistent sound of hammering. Fred’s coolies building the new milkhouse, more likely than not. The dairy operation was coming into its own this season. By next season the cheeses that were aging now would be ready for market, and the year after that their production ought to double.
Lily wished that Kate were with her, and that they could preserve this lovely day forever, that night would never come, nor the seasons change, nor either of them grow so much as a day older. There was magic on her hilltop, Lily had felt that from the first, and somehow this day gathered all the magic right out of the bright clear air and gave it to Lily Malone, free gift, just for coming here. How very lovely it would be, she thought, to have a little house up here, just a couple of rooms, but with great big windows and a huge porch, to be able to wake up in the morning and see this view! It might just be possible! Not this year, maybe, but next year, or the year after, it wouldn’t cost all that much, and Kate would love it.
On Lily’s hilltop in the August of the year 1864, everything seemed possible.
Brooks Chaffee stood in his favorite place at the bow of the clipper, a little apart from the others, enthralled by the sight of the soaring hills, this vast untouched land that might well be his future home.
The Anne Wallach had passed many a ship out of San Francisco these last few days, but now, now that they were nearly into the port itself, the immense Pacific was empty but for them. They were far out at sea, farther than Brooks expected, but cutting in now toward the mouth of the bay, the Golden Gate, hidden between its guardian hills.
He was all packed, all ready to disembark, and sad that the fine journey was ending.
For the first time, Brooks understood the call of the sea, how seductively it presented its own little world, its own choreography of adventures and challenges and amusements, all remote from the greater problems of the world left behind or the world yet to come.
The sea might be treacherous, but it could never break your heart like a woman. The sea might be beautiful, but all the secrets it held, and all its sparkling allure, were nothing compared to the charm and the mystery that could live in a girl’s eyes, alive with rippling changes, overflowing with promise, brimming with invitation to try what snug harbor, what jagged reef?
They don’t know me here, they can’t see the empty space where my heart once lived. Here I am what I am, or what I choose to make myself. Here I can walk down a street or into a restaurant without the rippling whispers coming after me; here I can hold my head up because even if the streets of San Francisco run with mud, my name hasn’t been dragged through it.
Brooks stood at the rail unsmiling. He felt better now than he had since Antietam, both physically and in his mind, yet the road back to ease and happiness was a long and treacherous one, and Brooks knew that he might never be able to go the distance. Yet even the small progress he had made on the voyage was precious to him, a faint flash of hope in the blackness of his despair, something to be cherished and nurtured like the flame from your last match on a freezing night.
The great clipper sailed smartly through the Golden Gate, sailors chanting, horns blaring, passengers cheering, all unaware of the doubts and fears and
half-formed hopes that raced uninvited through the heart and mind of the lone, embittered young man at the rail.
39
The new maid was named Carmelita, and while she was a sweet little thing and willing, Lily feared that she had been giggling in the vestibule when brains were being handed out. Patiently smiling, practicing her growing knowledge of Spanish, Lily was trying to show the girl how to clean lamp chimneys. Carmelita had never seen a proper lamp, much less its chimney. The chimney-cleaning lesson was going on in the kitchen of the big house, Lily in faded calico with her workday cotton kerchief binding her hair, an apron around her waist all smudged with lamp soot.
Lily didn’t hear the knocker. The housekeeper, Gloria Sanchez, appeared on silent feet to announce rather grandly: “Un señor para la señora.”
“Quién?”
Lily was annoyed: whoever it was, was unannounced. Maybe it was someone Fred could handle.
“Un hombre muy hermoso.”
Handsome, was he? Lily smiled.
Such value judgments were rare for the middle-aged and militantly virtuous Gloria Sanchez. If Gloria thought the visitor handsome, the visitor was probably Stanford. Lily got up, washed her hands, and went into the great hall. It would be good to see Stanford after all these months.
But her visitor was not Stanford Dickinson.
The door stood open behind him, and Lily’s visitor was framed in the bright early-afternoon sunlight, a tall, slim shadow in fine Mexican riding clothes, a loose white shirt, black leather vest, whipcord trousers, black tooled-leather boots, hatless. The sun touched his fair, windblown hair with platinum.