Valley of the Moon

by Melanie Gideon

  —

  Lux had brought Gennie a stuffed elephant and something called a lightsaber.

  “The Force is strong with this one,” she said. She gazed down at Gennie in her crib. “God, she’s so long.”

  “Twenty-three inches,” said Magnusson.

  The day after she’d been born, he’d taken his daughter to the woodshop and measured her himself. Of course Gennie would be tall; Magnusson was a giant.

  “And you’re all living here in the house?” Lux asked. “That’s so cozy.”

  Yes, Magnusson and Fancy had temporarily moved into the wing after Martha had died. I’d tried to convince Magnusson they should live in one of the cottages (surely they wanted more privacy), but Fancy wouldn’t hear of it.

  “She wants her uncle,” said Fancy, handing a bundled-up Gennie to me.

  I held her for a moment, an awkward smile on my face. The thumbprint of her fontanel, her green eyes, her snow-blond hair, made me distinctly uncomfortable. She was as alien to me as one of Nardo’s piglets.

  “Here.” I slid the baby into Lux’s arms.

  Lux was a complete natural. She expertly held Gennie in the crook of her arm, shifted her hip to the side, and began swaying back and forth. I unwittingly began moving in time to her rhythm.

  “I’d forgotten about their little starfish hands,” Lux said.

  “Joseph—are you dancing?” asked Fancy, smirking.

  For God’s sakes. Could I get away with nothing? “I’m going to the dining hall.”

  “Bring me back something sweet, I’m starving,” said Fancy. “This little one is eating me out of house and home.”

  This was entirely too much information. The other day I’d stumbled upon Fancy breastfeeding in the kitchen. Yes, she was covered, a blanket shielding her, but I could still hear what was going on. And then my sister tried to carry on a normal conversation with me. But the suckling! The gurgling! She’d seen my stricken look and admonished me.

  “This is not Victorian England. Nor do I have the luxury of a wet nurse, Joseph.”

  “But—”

  “But what?”

  “You look like you’re enjoying it.”

  She’d laughed then. “Why shouldn’t I enjoy it? I’m feeding my daughter, Joseph.”

  “Hold on, I’ll go with you,” said Lux. She carefully handed the baby back to Fancy.

  —

  Lux shivered. It was a cool day. I took off my jumper and handed it to her and she pressed it to her nose.

  “It smells like you.” She put it on; it came nearly to her knees. We walked across the yard and I watched as she took stock of Martha’s gardens.

  “The flower clock—I can’t believe you made it work. It’s beautiful.”

  “I’m not sure it’s really working,” I said. The clock required constant attention. Some plant was always on the verge of dying. And whether the blooms opened or closed exactly on the hour was anybody’s guess. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it, or time it. I’d only finished it as a tribute to Martha.

  “I brought you a greengage seedling,” Lux said nervously. “Please don’t be mad at me. Now, I know you said they’re notoriously hard to grow and there’s probably a perfectly good reason why you named this place Greengage Farm and there are no greengage trees on the property, but I just thought maybe—”

  I held up my hand, stopping her. “You brought me a greengage plum seedling.”

  Two pink spots appeared on her cheeks. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Really?”

  She bit her lip.

  “That does me no good.”

  “Fine, I’ll take it back with me. I knew I shouldn’t have—”

  “Because greengages can’t pollinate themselves. In order for the tree to bear fruit, I’ll need at least two other seedlings, different varieties, maybe the Monsieur, and the Royale de Montauban.”

  “You want to keep it?”

  She looked flustered and happy and I felt a piercing stab of gratitude for her. For knowing what I needed well before I knew and just getting it for me.

  “It’s time we grew into our name,” I said.

  We walked past the schoolhouse. I heard the children singing “Meet Me in St. Louis.” We caught a glimpse of Benno sitting in the back of the classroom, leaning forward, trying to learn the words to the song.

  “Do they ever sing anything else?” asked Lux.

  She was right. Miss Russell had a tiny repertoire of songs: “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “By the Old Oak Tree,” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”

  “Benno should teach them some modern stuff.” She popped up on her toes and then did a little spin. “Michael Jackson. Probably not your style.”

  We made our way across the meadow toward the dining hall.

  “So what’s it like for you, having a new baby in the house?” she asked.

  “She wakes every morning at two and at five.”

  Lux laughed. “God, I don’t miss that, I have to say. Infant time. The hours warp when there’s a baby around.”

  “How are you doing?” she asked a moment later, meaning How are you doing about Martha?

  I’d gotten to the point where Martha was dead in my dreams. I didn’t have to wake up anymore and remember she was gone. I knew this was a good thing, a sign of my moving on, but I missed the dark hours of the night when my unconscious gave me a brief holiday, when all was as it had been before.

  “It’s a little easier every day.”

  “I miss her so much,” she said. “I’ve tried to live the way she encouraged me to. Fully inhabiting my life. Both lives. Here and at home.”

  Something was changing between us. Now we could conduct our nighttime talks in the bright light of day. There was no clearing of throats. No small talk. Was it because of her son? Here, she said. This is my life. Take him. Take us.

  “Is it working?”

  She nodded. “Bringing Benno here makes that possible. I don’t know why I didn’t figure that out sooner. Thank you for making him feel so welcome.”

  We approached the dining hall. The smell of baked potatoes. Roasted chicken. Rosemary and thyme. My stomach growled. My appetite had returned.

  “I’m only sorry Martha didn’t get to meet him,” I said.

  “You are? Really?” said Lux.

  “She would have loved him,” I said.

  That night, just before midnight, Joseph and I met on the porch. He needed a haircut. His chin was stubbled, he hadn’t shaved in days. He had a sort of rakish look about him. Not unkempt, but loosened up.

  “I did not come from money,” he said.

  Recently he’d started launching into conversations in the middle of them, acting as if we’d been talking for hours. I guess it was the nature of our friendship, with month-long interruptions on his end and even longer ones on mine. We couldn’t afford to ease into it every time we picked back up.

  “My mother was a scullery maid and my father was the gardener’s son. He was desperate to make something of himself, to leave his past behind.”

  He lit a cigarette. Pulled on it, his eyes drawn nearly shut, then wordlessly handed it to me.

  “He did what he had to do. He weaseled, he finagled, he hustled. He worked from dawn until midnight. He failed and he failed and he failed again, but he never stopped demanding he be let in to the hallowed halls of the moneyed class. Finally a door opened. He made a fortune in textiles.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  “No, it wasn’t. He was a royal son of a bitch, to his colleagues, his employees, and to us. After my mother died, he sent me to boarding school. He wanted nothing to do with me.”

  He wagged his fingers impatiently. I took a quick drag and gave the cigarette back to him.

  “He never met Martha, did not attend my wedding. Never visited Greengage. He spent his whole damn life trying to buy his way into a higher class. And for what? He probably died alone in that enormous goddamned mansion.”

  “What was his name?”r />
  He took another drag. “Edward.” He flicked the ashes over the railing into the dirt. “I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. I’ve spent years resenting him.”

  So, we were alike in this way.

  My father came from nothing, too; he’d worked his way up and out of his circumstances. But unlike Joseph’s father, he’d never left his past behind. Every summer at Lapis Lake he embraced it; it was the foundation upon which he built his life.

  “And now I’m done,” said Joseph.

  “You’re done?”

  “Hating him. It’s what Martha would have wanted. Maybe we would have eventually reconciled. Maybe when his children vanished off the face of the earth, he changed. Maybe he spent the rest of his years looking for us. I’d like to think that he did.”

  My heart hammered with guilt at the knowledge that nobody had looked for him or for Fancy. There was no record they’d ever existed.

  “I’m nearly the same age he was when I last saw him. How can that be? Christ.” He handed me back the cigarette. “I feel sorry for him. He must have been such a lonely bastard.”

  I knew that kind of loneliness. I’d lived it until I found Greengage.

  “We have to leave the day after tomorrow,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  He was so hard to read. Was he just being polite? Or was he masking his disappointment?

  “It’s a long weekend. Benno doesn’t have school tomorrow, but he does on Tuesday. I can’t have him missing school. People will get suspicious.”

  “And there’s your job,” he said.

  “Yes, my job.” There was no way to call in sick from Greengage.

  “A loan officer,” he chuckled.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Do you remember the look on your face when I suggested you become a banker?”

  “I am not a banker,” I huffed.

  “You’re a banker.”

  “I’m the complete opposite of a banker. I work at a credit union. I work for the people, not Wall Street.”

  He grinned.

  “I don’t know why you think this is funny.”

  “It’s just—you remind me of somebody,” he said.

  “Martha?”

  “No, not Martha.”

  “Fancy?”

  He sighed. “You remind me of my mother, Lux. And trust me, that is a compliment. Before my father had her committed, she was just like you. Full of ideas, enthusiasm, gumption, pluck.”

  His mother was committed? By his father? To an institution? Why hadn’t he told me this before?

  “Was your mother emotionally unstable?”

  “No. At least she wasn’t before she was institutionalized.”

  “You told me your mother killed herself.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She killed herself after your father had her committed? At the institution?”

  “No, after she came home from the institution.”

  “She came home. So she got better?”

  “No,” he said impatiently, probably regretting now that he’d told me. “After she came home, she changed. It was like watching somebody slowly drowning. And I—I couldn’t do anything to pull her back up to the surface. None of us could. My father arranged to have her committed once again. And on the night before she was due to go back, she killed herself.”

  “Oh, Joseph,” I gasped.

  He waved his hand at me. “Sending your wife away wasn’t such an uncommon thing back then. Women—lively, outspoken women whose husbands couldn’t control them, or just didn’t like them, or wanted to shut them up—were institutionalized. An easy, sterile solution. Just put them away for a while.”

  “My God. That’s unspeakably horrible.”

  “That’s the world I grew up in. You can see why I was so anxious to leave it.”

  This new information required me to recalibrate. Here was the last big puzzle piece sliding into place. Now Greengage made total sense. Joseph’s utter devotion to it. To the memory of his mother.

  “She would have liked you,” he said. “She would have tried to recruit you for one of her causes.”

  “What were her causes?”

  “Women’s rights. Workers’ rights. Land preservation. The list is endless. Anything that needed fighting for.”

  “Did that include you? And Fancy?”

  “Yes, me and Fancy, until she wasn’t able to. Gennie is named after her.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that. That’s such a lovely tribute.”

  “Gennie looks like her, too. They have the same eyes.”

  “Is that difficult for you?” I asked. “Their similarities? Being reminded of her?”

  He smiled. “On the contrary. It makes me very happy. It’s as if she’s finally made it here. After all this time, she’s come home.”

  “Here. This is for you,” I said to Benno the next morning, handing him a box.

  Benno was a big talker. Over the last few days, I’d learned a great deal about him and his mother, more than I’d ever learned from Lux. I barely asked any questions and he expounded. He told me all about Newport, his grandmother Miriam and his grandfather George. His year at St. Paul’s, and Lapis Lake, where he and George went every summer.

  He examined my gift. “Eastman Kodak Brownie Camera. Is that supposed to be a brownie?” He pointed to the illustration of a little man with a huge stomach and froglike face. “Creepy. Are you sure you want to give this to me? It looks brand-new.”

  The camera was basically brand-new. I’d bought it in January of 1906.

  “Have you ever used a camera?” I asked.

  “Once or twice. I haven’t done much photography.”

  “I can see you taking photographs all the time in your mind. You look, you focus, and you snap. You take a mental image. I think it’s the way you make sense of things.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw that in me?”

  “You’re an observer, Benno.”

  Much like his mother, he was forthright, which I appreciated. There was no need for small talk—we just forged right into things. I liked to think I was a good role model, that I was giving him something that would help him make his way back in his own life. But the truth was I was getting something from him, too. He was a stitch to my shredded heart. Although our circumstances were entirely different, we were both of us fatherless, paternally unmoored.

  “I’ll take good care of it, I promise.”

  “It’s not a loan, it’s a gift. It’s yours to keep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am quite sure, young man. Go, now. Capture the world.”

  And so the next two years flew, a blur of work, school, and visits to the Valley of the Moon. Sunday night arrived and I blinked and it was Sunday night again. The old cliché seemed to be true. The older you got, the faster the days passed. I raced through time. I was acutely aware of it, but helpless to slow it down. I was not the driver. All I could do was sit in the passenger seat and gaze out the window as life streamed by.

  —

  Rhonda had another girl; they named her Sophie. Overcome with jealousy, Penny pinched Sophie and bit her tiny finger. When questioned, she burst into self-righteous tears and blamed it on the cat.

  I took Penny for the weekend and smothered her with attention. I made her breakfast-for-supper (pancakes and bacon) and brought her to see The Great Muppet Caper. She spent the entire movie in my lap. I breathed in the sweet apricot smell of her shampoo. Afterwards we went home and I painted her fingernails magenta. She did my hair up into two lopsided pigtails. She stared at me moon-eyed, asking me, when would she be old enough to wear a bra? When would she be old enough to wear rouge? I soaked up every minute.

  —

  Benno turned thirteen. No longer did he come home from school and tell me everything about his day. I barely knew the names of his friends.

  The sounds of Thriller seeped through his closed bedroom do
or. I wanted to run in there and hurl myself on the bed next to him. Tuck him under my arm and read him all of his old favorites. Goodnight Moon. Petunia. Instead I alphabetized my cookbooks, threw out old spices, and scrubbed the sink with Comet. Finally I heard his door open. He padded into the kitchen.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “There’s leftover mac and cheese. I can heat it up for you.”

  He got the milk out of the fridge. “Cookies?”

  “There’s some Fudge Stripes left.”

  “No, there’s not. I ate them.”

  My eyes flitted to the fine black hair above his upper lip. I could see the beginnings of a mustache.

  “Do you think I should shave?” he asked, following my gaze.

  “What do you think?”

  He stroked his chin. More and more I’d seen him trying out these manly gestures.

  “I’ll buy you some razors. You should have some anyway. If you don’t shave now, you’ll be shaving soon enough. So how was the movie?”

  He and Anjuli had gone to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was rated R, but I’d told them if they could figure out how to sneak in they could see it.

  “Fine.”

  Fine? That was all I was going to get? How had his first boob sighting affected him? Did they look like he thought they would look? I wanted to tell him so many things, but, most important, I wanted him to know that most girls’ breasts didn’t look like Phoebe Cates’s breasts.

  He opened the cupboard and plucked a few sticks of uncooked spaghetti from the box. He chewed on a strand. “Do you have plans with Steve tonight?”

  I’d been casually dating an accountant. In fact, he’d asked me to attend the symphony with him tonight, but I’d declined. He was nice enough, but a little boring.

  “No.”

  “You canceled on him.”

  “Yep.”

  “Why? He was nice.”

  Benno had taken a sudden interest in my love life. I dated occasionally, but never seriously. Men weren’t a priority. Benno, work, and Greengage were.

  “Why are you so concerned?” I asked.