She makes her way to her garden. There’s the moonlit fishpond, and the arborvitae, tall and pointed, that the clockmaker admired long ago. She remembers where she left a favorite pair of shears: beneath a boxwood. She is straightening up with the shears in her hands when she is struck from above, seized by sharp claws that dig through her sable hat and into her scalp. As she screams, the hat is wrenched from her head.
“An owl,” says Iris at breakfast. “It thought your hat was an animal. You didn’t see anything?”
“I told you, nothing,” Nelle says. Iris has never been so bold.
“A great horned owl,” Iris says. “They’ve been known to do that.” Nelle has the feeling Iris will laugh about this, alone or with friends. As if Nelle had worn a varmint on her head.
Oh, owls dwell here by the hundreds, barn owls and screech owls, all kinds. Their pellets cover the loft floors. Their hoots and sighs carry on calm nights. The big trees in the garden—of course owls live there. Nelle has seen smaller birds harry an owl into daylight, the owl’s mottled wings and body reminding her of a tortoiseshell cat.
Unnerving to be singled out, attacked, and robbed. The boys are down in the garden searching for the hat or some clue. When she screamed, it was Nehemiah who came running like a ghost in his white jacket. He took the shears from her hands, and they went back to the house. The roots of Nelle’s hair tingled all night, but she has no wounds, none that Richard found as he gently probed her scalp with his fingers, his body on hers.
Due to arrive today is the last of Lorna’s offspring, the one Nelle has most anticipated.
“Here they come,” says Richard, standing at a window, bunching the curtain, “Laird’s man with the little filly.” He turns to face her. “So you got them all.”
Was this how her brother Russell felt when he fell off the mountain? He was the son her mother and father pinned their highest hopes upon. Far away, that happened. Telegrams arrived. Russell was in a hospital in Switzerland, then a hospital in Italy, then was returned to his family broken and vague. Mr. Hull must do everything for him, even cut his nails.
She has not been to her family home in Devon for nearly a year, not since the trouble began with her father. She tells herself there’s nothing in the Devon house that she wants, and yet: a blue glass sugar bowl decorated with sterling filigree, a sterling bird on the lid. An oil painting of the Bay of Malta. A rose medallion bowl big enough to bathe a baby in and decorated with figures of men and women in a garden, their faces wearied by pleasure. In her girlhood room, her tennis clothes must still hang in the closet, and her wedding gown.
Despair will lift, her mother always said, if you help those less fortunate. Every winter, Ida gathered blankets and provisions for poor families and held meetings in her conservatory for settlement house officials. The butler poured tea while Russell in a corner snatched at a butterfly and Mr. Hull murmured, “Let it alone, now. Let it go.”
A woman Nelle has never seen before comes to ask Richard for a divorce from her husband. Nelle’s new furniture has arrived. As men unload it from a wagon and carry it inside, Richard and the woman move to the far end of the porch. The woman has a bad complexion and odd hair, a scant swath affixed to her head with a scarf. Richard is saying, “I’ll have to speak with your husband, but I’ll give consideration to what you’ve told me.”
“He’ll tell lies,” the woman bursts out, twisting her hair.
It’s not human hair. The color and sheen are an animal’s. A horse’s tail. Well, if you were poor and bald, if you couldn’t afford a wig… Did you leave enough for the horse to switch at flies? Nelle wants to ask. Richard won’t notice. Goody two-shoes he is, with this woman wagging a tail right under his nose, her face uglier than a horse’s ass. The popinjay would laugh about that. Nelle misses his crude streak.
It would be so much simpler if she were in love with Richard.
The deliverymen ask, “Where does it go, ma’am?”
“Upstairs,” she says. “Follow me.” The new furniture is mahogany, with a luster as rich as Lorna’s coat. She wishes she could stop thinking about her father. Her mind is hunting him of its own accord, without her volition, a painful chase. Everything now is part of that.
At least she’s not pregnant. Familiar pain assures her, and wetness in her underclothes even as she points out where the new desk goes, and the new chest of drawers that cost so much.
* * *
That season in São Paulo, the Brazilian doctor took to calling at the hotel, ostensibly to see that her father’s recovery was complete. One day, he asked her father for her hand. Her father answered, “My daughter can’t marry a foreigner,” and the doctor burst into tears. They were in the hotel courtyard, the Scott family and the doctor, whose name was Alejandro. Nelle wore a dress with a blue sash. She was drinking horchata, a concoction of milk, cinnamon, and ground chufa, a local tuber. The proposal, the rejection, and the tears happened as if she weren’t present.
Later, Nelle’s brothers teased her, imitating the doctor’s swooning gaze, and Nelle’s mother asked, “Have you encouraged him?”
“Yes,” said Nelle, “but I don’t want to marry him.”
Ida said, “It’s time we moved on.”
The doctor did not visit again. Nelle sat in the courtyard thinking. The doctor had told her father she could have a ranch outside the city to raise horses. She decided there was something in the doctor’s emotion that appealed to her.
“So you still haven’t sent the papers?” she asks Willie Ambrose, on the telephone. “My God, what do I have to say to you?”
Ambrose is quiet for a long time and then says, “Nelle, I would like to call on your sister-in-law. Iris. May I do that, sometime?”
Holding the receiver, Nelle blinks. “Of course.”
“Sunday, then,” he says.
He was ill on her porch, wasn’t he, the evening she signed the documents. Ill and upset about something, but she can’t recall.
She won’t mind if Lorna’s new foal is ordinary, just so it lives. She won’t care if it’s stupid, if it bites, if it’s given to feeding on snow or kicking or pawing, wearing out its hooves and shoes on one side. It can do light work or serve as a saddle horse for someone not too particular.
All those months she was pregnant. Fifty-four months, plus more for miscarriages. Years of pregnancy. But a horse can be pregnant as long as four hundred days, with eleven months being average. There can be monstrosities. Deformed foals. Heads or limbs doubled or cleft or missing. An entire extra body. Two sets of forelegs sticking out of the birth canal: she saw that at a neighbor’s farm and didn’t stay to watch the end. Deliveries in such cases are horrible episodes of amputation and death. Healthy twins are rare.
There can be other problems. A fetus might be turned tragically wrong in the womb, beyond the help that a skilled, oiled hand might provide. If formed outside the womb, a fetus can be carried for months or years, never delivered. Wouldn’t the mare keep waiting for contractions, those tearing pains? The bursting out of a new body from her own?
No wax yet on Lorna’s teats. When her water breaks, it’ll break hard, a gushing flow.
Nelle wakes in the night hearing rapping on the door. She sits up, sheets clutched to her chin. Her father. It must be her father, come to Virginia. Shaking, she runs through her sleeping house, down the staircase into the silent entrance hall. She can’t bring herself to open the door, to find out if anyone is there or not.
She creeps to the dining room and takes the brandy from the sideboard. A deep swallow, a little swig. The rapping was metallic. He must have used his dog’s-head cane, topped with a bronze replica of a Yukon husky. Surely her door is pitted and marked.
She has never been one to imagine things.
She takes to sleeping so deeply during afternoon naps that she doesn’t wake except when one of the boys, usually Gordon, blows in her ear. A scream snags in her chest as she wonders who this is, this child hanging over her, looking so sad.
From her brother Charlie comes a letter: “Father has taken to his bed over this. I beg you, Nelle, drop the suit.”
She has won. Hasn’t she? To drive him into hiding—that is victory. That he has taken to his bed not in grief but in rage is of no importance. She has fired and hit her mark. It was he who trained her, after all, he who steadied her hands on a rifle in the green hills near Devon, their eyes fixed on rising skeet. She sets her brother’s letter down.
There will be parries and thrusts, years of skirmishes; and on her father’s part, the crafting of a will that skips Nelle and her sons, bequeathing the remnants of her mother’s estate to Nelle’s future grandchildren, in circumstances distant by nearly a century. A hundred years: the last of Nelle’s children must die before the fortune is disbursed. A child not yet born, an inheritance already waning within the hands of Seebold Brouse & Stull.
Across from the hotel in São Paulo was a public garden with fountains and topiary. Nelle sent the doctor, Alejandro, a letter. Meet me in the park. All day she was excited. She endured a tedious, if appetizing, luncheon with her parents and brothers: a salad made of sliced beets and blood oranges. At two o’clock she went to the park and settled on a bench facing the boulevard. Immediately, Alejandro appeared on the opposite side of the street, his face shaded by trees. He spied her, raised his arm, and stepped into the avenue. Nelle heard a carriage before she saw it strike him.
Only one of the two horses was injured, and not badly, though their harness was broken. The blood on the horse’s flank shocked her. She did not see Alejandro after he was hit, except for a glimpse of his white shirt as he lay facedown in the street. A crowd collected. People turned the dead man over and called out his name. Nelle couldn’t help but be impressed that he was so well known.
She remained on her bench. A police officer apologized for the dreadful spectacle she’d witnessed, and she confirmed that it was the driver’s fault. When he asked her name and address, she gave her mother’s maiden name and the name of a hotel across town.
She never told her family. Their rooms faced away from the street. They were busy packing and didn’t notice the commotion outside. None of them could read Portuguese, not even Nelle’s father, who spoke French and German, so if the incident was reported in the evening paper, the Scotts didn’t see it. They ordered an early dinner brought to their rooms. They would depart the next day by steamer for Philadelphia, by way of Cuba.
He died for me. She said it to herself as they headed into open sea, He died for me, and she turned heads in the ballroom and out on deck, under the stars. Why hadn’t she run to Alejandro? Why hadn’t she cried out? Even as she breathed ocean air, his hearse might be proceeding down the boulevard where he died. She could almost believe it hadn’t happened, carriage hauled away, body covered and removed. No, she always came back to the blood on the horse’s flanks, a wound that would heal.
At the shipboard beauty salon, she directed a little monkey of a man to sweep back her hair and adorn it with pearls. The man lifted her hair in his hands as he brushed it. “Golden,” he said, “and Miss has golden eyes to match. Many, many men will want to marry Miss.”
A dazzle of frost coats the ground, come mornings. The woman with the horse-tail hair visits on the porch again and again, and she and Richard laugh together. Out in the stable, Nelle curries Lorna’s coat and rubs her sides, feeling no movement that a baby would make.
It’s a long way to the porch, yet the sound carries, her husband laughing with a woman who wears a horse’s tail. Sunday after Sunday has slipped by, and Willie Ambrose has not called on Iris. He must have changed his mind. Nelle has never mentioned his plans to anyone. It’s the one kindness she will ever do her sister-in-law.
The great wind in this stable, weeks ago; the swooping owl that took her hat away; her hatred of her father: All of that has led to this moment and is leading somewhere still, beyond her and past her, as she plucks the coarse fiber from the comb and flings it out the door. Birds will twine it with her mother’s hair in nests deep in the woods.
Even a stranger’s laughter can grow familiar.
That sound is part of it, too, leading to the birth of Lorna’s foal. Nelle chooses to believe, as the woman’s laughter crests and breaks, that the colt will be born on New Year’s Day, a beauty, small but perfectly formed, rising on such long legs.
Nelle on the Grass
I
Nelle can’t do it anymore, can’t cross the space between stable and house. Her own yard has become the hardest part of her affair, that distance to cover after a visit with her lover, Ben Burleigh, and after turning her horse over to Stanton, the stable boy. Just outside the building, she lies down on the grass. Eats a few frostbitten sprigs, spitting out the tough seams.
It’s February 1932. In a month she’ll be forty-nine years old. She stretches out on her side, the way she sleeps in bed. Her new riding habit is thick enough to keep her warm, for a while at least.
The grass tastes like cabbage and iron. Her hat falls off her head, but only her hands are anxious, the fingers flexing in black leather gloves. It’s five o’clock, a beautiful dusk, the sky a glimmering royal blue, the mountains in the west the best thing in her life.
Stanton, his face comic with worry, calls her name, asks if she’s hurt, but she waves him away. She realizes he is older—twenty-five?—than she had thought; time moves so quickly. After all, she has seven sons to keep track of, some grown, the youngest only seven; as well as the people who work on her property, looking after the animals, farming the land, and cooking, cleaning, gardening. Richard makes sure the animals get their vaccinations. She does almost everything else. Doesn’t she? God, she is tired. The walkway to the house may as well be made of fire, for all she wants to get up and use it. Doesn’t the privet hedge look stupid, all scraggly with winter. She has a mind to pull it out, right now.
“Ma’am. Did you fall?” Stanton kneels beside her.
He must know about Ben; everybody knows. She has tried to be discreet, but she has failed. Scraps of the affair will be preserved in stories that will reach through time to her grandchildren’s ears: gossips’ purported glimpses of her and Ben in the woods at his hunting cabin, tales of her leaving the supper table to take a phone call from Ben Burleigh and sob like a child.
She’s never cried on the phone in her life.
“I didn’t fall,” she says.
Stanton heads to the house. Long ago, when he was a boy, he clattered up on her porch, yelping, “Pa hung hisself.” His pa was overseer, back then. Turns out the old man had drunk wood alcohol and hanged himself. She’d hired another overseer and let the boy stay on, sleeping in the stable.
As she might do. Sleep in the barn from now on and never enter her house again.
Lying on the grass, she remembers getting measles when she was a young woman visiting India. The lassitude she feels now is what she felt then, not sick but surrendering. She arranged a veil over her blotched face so her family could all go on board. Her father kept to his elaborate itinerary, and in any case it was too hot, time to move on. She and her mother had worn silver ball gowns to the Durbar and danced with Englishmen. That was during her second trip to the Orient; yes, in 1903, when she was nineteen, almost twenty.
With satisfying suddenness, her thoughts move to the hams in her smokehouse—how many are left? How thick has the benign mold grown on the fat, that friendly moss covering the sweet, salty meat? You scrape off the mold, soak the ham, press cloves into it, and bake it with a crust of brown sugar. She has taught her cook, Philip, how to do that.
Men cut ice on the river today, sawing big blocks and heaving them into wagons. The men went home hours ago, she guesses. She had stopped on the bridge to watch them. The riverbanks were slippery with cold, and the horses hitched to the wagons stamped their feet.
There are eels in the river, and Philip can prepare them nicely in fried batter, but once her children found out what they were, they would no
t eat that dish. It would not hurt them to eat humble food now and then. She loves sweet potatoes, can’t get enough of them, a food she’d never tasted before coming to Virginia as a bride, nearly twenty-five years ago.
A commotion reaches her ears. She closes her eyes so she won’t see her household proceeding toward her. Put coats on, for God’s sake, she wants to say, for they have dashed outside as if heedless of the cold.
Oh, sooner or later, she’ll have to pee. She could try to not be physical anymore, not hungry or thirsty, even though she made love all afternoon. Her household buzzes around her, imploring, surrounding her. She bats them away, children, servants, husband, sister-in-law Iris with an ugly crocheted collar around her neck. She thinks about measles and ice and her prize-winning daylilies hunkered down in red clay waiting for the hot season to start, the glorious Virginia summers and warm autumns that she loves.
Trays of food and hot drinks are presented, which she ignores, and here comes the doctor, driving up in his black car as if the long, curving driveway is a snake he is mowing down. Show-off. She won’t even sit up for hours, won’t rise until they’ve all gone inside. If it weren’t for that patch of yard, she’d never think she was doing wrong. Generally, the affair weighs so lightly on her conscience. Master of Hounds, Ben Burleigh runs the hunts. She will always have the first thing he ever said to her, “I never saw two such high hearts,” meaning herself and a favorite horse, Nilanti, that she rode the day they met.
Stanton, running up on the porch the night his father died: he had a distance to cross, a stubbly field from the overseer’s cottage to the big house. Does he remember how it felt to run so hard while crying out? That was how long ago—ten years or twelve? Stanton was so young his voice was still a girl’s. Pa hung hisself. Help, help. Pa hung hisself. Richard heard him before he reached the porch, Richard was out the door already when the boy flung himself up the steps, fast as a jackrabbit; Richard took hold of him by the shoulders, and later Richard said, He didn’t cry.
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