‘You see things that I do not,’ I said. ‘It’s all a maze to me.’ I reached for him, running my fingers up his arms and breathing in his scent of hay and soap.
‘Cathy,’ he said.
I embraced him. I wanted this moment never to end.
The night seemed to last only minutes with Oscar up hours before sunrise. If he was exhausted, it didn’t show. His smile came as easily as did his caresses, our hands touching when mid-morning he came back to the house. ‘Just to see how you’re getting on,’ he told me. He stayed only a few minutes but it was long enough to put Nan out of sorts. She was short with Andre when, a little later, he brought her a rock he’d found in the pasture. ‘I’m busy,’ I heard her say. ‘Dinner won’t make itself and I can hardly do it with you on my heels every time I turn around.’ He slunk off to the veranda where I was, his head down and his shoulders slumped.
‘I’d like to see it,’ I said. ‘If I may?’
He opened his hand. It was an ordinary gray rock and even Andre now seemed to see it as such, drooping all the more.
‘Tell me again the names of your dogs,’ I thought to say. ‘I didn’t have a pet when I was a child.’
He wrinkled his freckled nose, his dark eyes puzzled. ‘Why not?’ he said.
‘My mother wouldn’t allow it.’
‘Why not?’
‘She believed dogs and cats were dirty.’
‘How come?’
‘She had strict rules about hygiene.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Cleanliness,’ I said. I stood. ‘Now, no more questions. Let’s go see your dogs.’
He grinned. I’d surprised him, I thought as we stood in the yard with Bob, Streak, Bear, and Tracker. They smelled and were in need of baths, but all the same I felt a measure of pride. This was what a mother did, I told myself. She distracted her child when he was upset. I was learning.
That afternoon, I took Oscar’s book, The Milky Way, and went outside to the front veranda where Andre played on the floor with his set of dominos. The long-haired brown dog that Andre called Bob lay on the second step down with his back legs kicked out and his chin between his mud-flecked paws. Inside, Nan prepared the evening meal, the clanking of crockery and skillets telling me that she was hard at work.
I opened Oscar’s book and looked at the illustrations of star clusters as if this would tell me something about the man who showed me the North Star and the Great Bear. I skimmed over the text but stopped when I came across a passage underlined with pencil.
Night is, in truth, the hour of solitude, in which the contemplative soul is regenerated in the universal peace. We become ourselves; we are separated from the factitious life of the world, and placed in the closest communion with nature and with truth.
I had expected it to refer to the names of stars and planets. I read it again: the hour of solitude. The phrase turned in my mind.
The past eight months in Dayton had been my hour of solitude. My income almost gone, I had examined all of my choices. A possibility had been marriage to one of the elderly widowers who lived in the hotel. Another was employment in a shop and certain poverty. I had even considered using Edward’s letters against him. Instead, I chose Oscar.
I read the passage again. We become ourselves; we are separated from the factitious life of the world. Five nights ago at the pavilion, Oscar ate with the neighbor men and danced with the women, rural unrefined people, but that hadn’t mattered to him. He enjoyed their company. The music was simple and sentimental but for Oscar, it could have been a symphony. He found pleasure in the stars and admired the grace of pelicans. He was without pretense and this, I realized, was what drew me to him.
I found another underlined passage.
Fiction can never be superior to truth; the latter is a source of inspiration to us, richer and more fruitful than the former.
The truth. Not fiction. I went back to the first underlined passage: closest communion with nature and with truth.
I put the book on the small table beside me and got up.
‘Ma’am?’ Andre said. ‘Where you going?’
‘Nowhere. Just thinking.’
I stepped around Andre and his dominos and went to the western edge of the veranda. All was still at the barnyard, and farther down the island, the rooftops of St. Mary’s were visible in a haze of salt.
The truth. It was important to Oscar.
The truth. My past. Something that must stay buried. If Oscar should find out, he’d never forgive me. But he wouldn’t find out. Unless someone from Dayton would write to him.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. I was finished with the past.
The black crystal earrings, I thought. The ones from Edward Davis. Last Friday, I had tucked them into a side pocket of one of the trunks. I had resolved to bury them in the sand or to throw them into the gulf. Before I’d had a chance to do so, Oscar had taken the trunks to the attic.
Perspiration broke out along my hairline. I couldn’t bear the thought of the earrings being anywhere in the house. I stepped back around Andre and went inside. At the cooking table, Nan chopped an onion with her back to me. She disliked me, I thought. She considered me unworthy of Oscar and of Andre. I could not cook, and I did not keep house. She watched my every move and passed judgment. I saw her disdain in the way she looked at me, and I heard it in her tone. I could not begin to imagine what she would do or say if she knew the truth about me.
Nan’s movements were jerky, stopping and starting in fits as she handled the knife. The door that opened to the attic stairwell was at the back parlor wall. I walked toward it. A floorboard popped and Nan turned around. Her eyes were red and tears ran down her cheeks.
‘Why, you’re crying,’ I said.
‘Am not,’ Nan said. ‘Don’t know why you’d say that.’ She put the knife down on the cutting board. ‘It’s the onion. I’d like to know the woman that can chop an onion and not bawl.’ She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. ‘I ain’t no crybaby, can’t nobody say that about me.’
‘Of course not.’ I couldn’t go up to the attic, I thought. Not with Nan watching.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘Might as well tell you now. Might as well just come out with it. Since you’re asking. Sunday’s my last day.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I’m needing a change, let’s just you and me let it go at that.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She didn’t say anything.
I said, ‘You’re leaving us? Quitting?’
‘I don’t quit nothing, never have. I’m making a change, that’s what this is.’ She turned around to the counter, her knife a sharp staccato on the cutting board again. Her back to me, she said, ‘But I won’t have it said that I didn’t give fair notice. I was fixing to tell you, this being just Thursday. There’s others out there. Maybe one of the older girls at St. Mary’s. Or somebody in town that’s looking for a change. Someone tired of working in a big, overly fancy house.’ Nan’s knife stopped; she turned to face me. ‘Mr Williams’ll have to ask around. There’s other women that cook good. I won’t have it said that I left you all in a fix.’
‘No one will say that about you, Miss Ogden.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because I won’t have talk going around. And Frank T. and Wiley’ll bring the peas and eggs and suchlike, fish and all, that won’t change: nobody’s going to starve.’ She ran the palms of her hands along the sides of her apron, then did it again. ‘Let’s just leave it at that.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll tell Andre on Sunday. Not a minute before. I won’t have a fuss made.’
‘I understand. We don’t want him upset.’ He would be upset, though. He was attached to her, but as difficult as the parting would be, I felt a great sense of relief. This house was too small for Nan and me. Soon I’d be free of her judgmental glances and her knowing tone of voice. Just as she would be free of me.
She picked up the cutting board and
brushed the diced onion into a skillet.
‘Andre will miss you,’ I said. ‘We all will.’
‘Don’t want to talk about it.’
‘And so we won’t.’ Some things, I understood, could not bear the weight of words.
As soon as Nan left for the day with her brothers, I put on my sun hat. In the parlor, I opened the door to the attic. Hot air rushed out in waves, and at the top of the staircase, thin slivers of light pierced the darkness.
I hurried up the narrow stairs, the air becoming denser with each step. Support beams held up the roof, and in the gloom it took a few moments before I saw the trunks that were near a side wall between two rafters. I opened one of them, slid my hand into the side pocket and found the black crystal earrings. Struggling to breathe in the dense air, my corset compressing my lungs, I put them in my skirt pocket and closed the trunk. I left the attic, then the house, taking the front veranda steps.
‘Where you going?’
I started. It was Andre. He was under the house on his hands and knees holding his spade.
‘I’m taking a walk.’
‘Now? In the middle of the day? Can I come?’
‘No.’ My tone was sharp. I gathered myself. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes. When I return, we’ll play the upright before I start dinner.’
‘“Mary Had a Little Lamb”?’
‘Yes.’
He grinned, and before he could say more, I was on the path that led to the sand hills. Should Oscar happen to see me, I would tell him that I’d had a sudden desire to see the beach. The dog with the bushy tail, Bear, came with me and although I told him to go back, he was undeterred and stayed close. The path was muddy from Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s rain and it was a mistake to have worn my better shoes but I would not turn back.
At the hills, a wispy layer of sand covered the planked road, and in places, hoof prints and the narrow tracks of the wagon wheels were visible. I followed the road, winding through the hills. When I was sure that I couldn’t be seen from the house or from the barn, I stopped and took the black crystal earrings out from my skirt pocket.
Each dropped earring had three linked beads and their facets caught the light just as they had when Edward gave them to me two years ago. He had come to Philadelphia, and we were dining in a small restaurant located on a side street off of Delancey Place. ‘Happy birthday, my dear,’ he’d said as I opened the box. My birthday had been the previous month but I smiled as though it didn’t matter. Our liaison had begun a year before, and I had quickly learned to make excuses and allowances for the three- or four-month gaps between visits. I pushed Edward’s family from my thoughts and convinced myself that the whims of his business dealings with the Pennsylvania Railroad dictated his trips.
Should we happen to encounter someone he knew, I was introduced as his cousin. ‘Friends since we were children,’ he’d say. In public, we walked with a respectable distance between us as cousins would do. I maintained this same façade with my friends and said little about Edward. The earrings, though, were something that I could touch, a reminder, along with his weekly letters, that he cared deeply for me and that I was never far from his thoughts.
In the restaurant, I held them to the light. The facets sparkled with shades of pink, lavender, and blue. ‘They’re exquisite,’ I said to Edward across from me at the small table.
‘They are, aren’t they?’ he said. He laid his hand flat on the white linen tablecloth and inched it across the table until it met mine. ‘They’re from Austria,’ he said. He caressed my fingers for a moment, a promise of what would happen later that evening when we were alone. Then, with a quick glance around the room, he withdrew his hand.
On the sand hill road, the wind gusted and my skirt wrapped around my legs. Bear ran on ahead and disappeared from my sight. I couldn’t throw the earrings into the surf. They might wash ashore along with the splintered trees torn from river banks and the bottles thrown from ships. I imagined them weeks from today, months even, shining in the sand, drawing attention and someone – Oscar, Andre, Nan, or the Ogden men – finding them.
I got down onto my knees. The planks were warped and uneven, and in some places along the sides, small drifts of sand had formed while in others the wind had scooped out deep hollows. The surface planks were held fast, I saw, nailed to two perpendicular boards below.
I pushed one earring, then the other, through a space between two planks. They fell onto the sand beneath the road. This was the one place where I could bury them and not leave deep footprints in the hills or signs of digging. Here, they would stay covered. The sand might shift, but the road would not.
I rocked back onto my heels. Bear had returned. His brown fur was spiky with water. He looked at me, panting, his head cocked. I got up and followed the road toward the beach. I wanted to be able to tell Oscar at least part of the truth should he ask what I had been doing. Ahead of me, the dog shot off, chasing seagulls near the tide line. At the end of the road, I stopped.
Without Oscar or Andre, the beach was a lonely place, eerie in its vastness with not a soul in sight. ‘Bear,’ I called, but he didn’t hear me. He kept running, scattering the birds.
The tide was high and washed closer to the hills than I had seen before. ‘It was the gulf,’ Oscar had told me on Tuesday night as we lay together, my hand on his chest. ‘How it was never the same.’ Unexpected tears filled my eyes. Oscar shoveling coal outside my window as I practiced the piano, his decision to leave Dayton, his letters, the tides pulling him to Galveston, the death of his wife, my liaison, my desperation, all these things had brought me to this place and to him. To change one was to change it all.
Past the breakers five pelicans sat on the water, bobbing on soft swells, their wings folded and their long beaks pointed down as though they were resting. Up the beach, the dog was a distant figure. ‘Bear,’ I called, blotting my tears with my fingertips.
Oscar will not discover the truth about my past, I told myself. No one will write to him; I will never breathe a word about it.
‘I’m leaving,’ I called out to Bear. He raised his head, and all at once he started to lope toward me, ignoring the birds, sure of his way.
I turned around and there, on the other side of the sand hills, were three rooftops. Andre was waiting for me, I thought. I had promised him a lesson. I began to walk, the light layer of sand crunching beneath my shoes, the earrings lost beneath the road.
A few minutes before five o’clock, I sent Andre to wash for dinner. ‘Your face, too,’ I told him. ‘There’s a bit of dirt on your cheek.’ Then, I left the house, went beneath the veranda, and took out a penny from my pocket. It was dull and its rim was flattened in one place as though it were old. I tossed it close to where Andre had been digging. It landed with a soft plop. Treasure, I thought. For him to find someday.
After that, I met Oscar on the path between the house and the barn, and told him Nan had given notice and Sunday was her last day.
‘This Sunday?’ he said. ‘Why? What happened?’
‘Nothing. Or at least nothing that I’m aware of. It surprised me, too.’
‘And she didn’t say why?’
‘It seems she wants a change.’
‘A change? That’s what she said? She’s not one for such.’
‘She didn’t want to talk about it.’
‘But she’s part of this family. All of the Ogdens are. Have been since I bought the dairy.’ He paused. ‘I’ll talk to her.’
‘Oscar, she wants to leave. She was quite emphatic about that. Perhaps you should let her.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Things are different now, I see that. But we can hardly do without her. Nan knows her way around here. No, there’s something more to this. Likely it’s that foolish notion she has about a curse.’
‘A curse?’
‘That’s what she calls it. Thinks she’s bad luck for the men that care about her, two of them dying just before she was to marry them.’
‘Oh, Oscar.
’
‘Could be she sees herself as a curse to Andre. I don’t know. She’s superstitious. Some of the people down in these parts have peculiar notions. Nan’s given up the idea of ever marrying.’
‘She’s told you this?’
‘Not me, Bernadette.’
I flinched. Misery crossed his face; he couldn’t meet my eyes. Even at the cemetery, her name had not been said. But now it was as though he had given life to her, the woman with whom he had lived, who had borne his son, and who had died carrying his next child.
I was the second wife and always would be. Oscar and Bernadette had shared a life; they had shared confidences. Perhaps Bernadette would have told him the truth about Nan. Perhaps she would have told him that Nan’s need to leave had nothing to do with a curse but everything to do with her feelings for Oscar. At the pavilion last Saturday evening, a mix of pain and longing showed in Nan’s eyes each time she looked at him. I had seen, too, how she’d held on to his hand when he thanked her for playing the violin. She’d bowed her head when he left to speak to the other musicians and for a moment, I thought she was crying. Then, she raised her head and our eyes met. Although I was on the other side of the pavilion, I felt her resentment. Nan cared for Oscar, but he had chosen a woman very different than she. That was an insult that cut to the quick.
The Promise Page 17