by Sharon
"Wasn't it Alan Wilde you met in the woods with the monster?" Edna asked.
"Yes."
"What sort of man is he, did you think?"
After a pause, she said, "I wouldn't think he'd make much of a farmer."
They laughed. He was of the city, of the world, different and far away from them, and, they imagined, from her too. So they allowed the subject to drop, because what was outside was not part of them. They were pilgrims in a sinful world. Separate. The Plain People.
What sort of man is he? How full of that question she was herself. She had wakened at dawn, thinking of Polly finding cherry blossoms on her pillow, half-expecting to find them on her own. But there had been only the warm impression where her head had been and the fresh, whispering memory of his caress. She had pressed her eyes closed; tentatively, fearfully had retraced the path of his hands with her own, moving her palms lightly over her breasts. Her whole body wore the burning imprint of his closeness. He had carried her too far… too far. What was the antidote to this sweet poison of his that made her feel so sleepy and full of nothing but him?
On the bridge he had said he wanted her. She remembered the shock of it, the honest surprise that he could say it so bluntly, so openly. As disturbed by it as she had been, she had still let him draw her inexorably toward him.
And true to his own peculiar sense of integrity, he had warned her on her first day on the movie set. Only, she had failed to absorb the reality of it. It had been one of too many curiosities coming quickly, and with so much competing for her awe, the impact had faded.
What sort of man was he? Intricate and clever, with a strictly controlled surface and light-filled eyes and beautifully made mouth that hinted at the wildness inside him. One sure thing about him—he was too much man for Susan Peachey.
Before she left for home, that evening, Fanny called out, "Wait once, Susan, I'll walk with you. The kids'll go home with Christ in the buggy."
They took the long way. It wasn't a walk to Fanny if she didn't get to climb a fence or two. Making their way across a hay field, catching the damp of evening on their skirts, Susan said, "Christ was in high spirits tonight, I thought."
"I'm about done weaning Jesse."
"Oh?"
"I've had Christ sleeping downstairs. I told him, no more babies until Jesse's weaned."
"Does he mind?"
"He don't say anything, but he sure looks long-faced when I go upstairs to bed."
They laughed and then there was quiet, just their skirts brushing the pasture grass, and the frogs singing. Then Fanny said, "I sat by your Grandma at dinner."
"I saw you did."
"She leaned over to me and said, didn't I think you got awful quiet when the talk got to Grey ling." Susan's footsteps slowed. "Don't notice so much, please."
"That'll be some kind of day, when you look troubled and I don't notice."
"I can't bring you into this."
"Why not?"
"To know and keep secret, you would have to break your vows to the church."
Fanny stopped walking. She looked small in the evening light. "You must be in bad trouble, then."
"You can't help me, Fan. Not now."
"Don't shut the door in my face, Susan."
"I don't want to. I've seen so much, I've felt so much… but I can't tell you until it's over and I've put myself right with the church."
"Don't wait. Share it with me now."
"I care for you too much for that. If I had typhus, I wouldn't come over to share it with you either."
"If you had typhus, I'd be there looking after you."
"When it's over and I tell the Bishop and don't feel so good, then you can come by, and bring me a pie and hold my shoulders."
There was a shaky silence. They began to walk, and Fanny slipped her arm around Susan. In a scared and unfamiliar voice, Fanny said, "I don't have to wait to hold your shoulders."
Waiting, changing buses, walking the stretches in between, Daniel made his way to Chicago. Passing through the green of the suburbs and coming into the city was like descending into a concrete vault. The noise always hit him first. He could almost see it, like black scars everywhere in the air that left the taste of metal on the tongue. Acre after acre of good farm land buried under blacktop and steel. If they kept doing this, where were they going to grow what it took to feed all those people?
And people were everywhere. He could hardly take a step without bumping into someone. In the country, people always seemed to him like healthy, growing things, but in the city they were like an infection. He was xenophobic, he supposed. Rachel thought he was. She'd taught him the word.
"They do that to you, Daniel," she'd told him once.
"How many times have you seen an Amish mother or father say to a child when English are around, 'Hush! Don't speak!' They make you feel like something's wrong."
Don't look at city people in a mass, she'd said. Look at each one individually, because that's how they look at themselves. And she was right. Individually they were fascinating.
Rachel lived within walking distance of the university. She'd had to ride the bus from her first apartment. Now she only had to take a bus at night, to the nursing home where she worked. It was that bus ride that bothered Susan more than anything. Him, too, after what he'd heard about crime in the city streets.
Rachel's apartment building must once have been elegant, but it was shabby now. Soot had worked its way deep into the architectural embellishments, a brave weed or two struggled up through cracks in the front walkway, and here and there someone had spray-painted a four-letter word—slogans of the decay.
"I like it here," Rachel had told him. "It has atmosphere."
He had written last week, and as soon as he pushed the buzzer in her lobby and said his name, she was running down the inner steps, throwing the door open, and wrapping him tightly in her arms.
He pulled back to look at her. Her eyes brimmed, but she would not cry, he knew. She was too obstinate. Her tears would come after he left.
Small, mannish, and strong, she looked out from soft eyes, moved with clean motions. Her face was angular, ascetic, like a monk's face, a saint's face. It was not pretty, but with makeup it might have been striking. He wondered if she'd tried it.
Though she no longer dressed Amish, she wore simple clothes. Today a pair of jeans, an undecorated white shirt. But each time he saw her she seemed a little further from him and the girl she once had been. She was wearing a necklace, he noticed; it was the first time he'd seen her do it. It was simple, too, a pewter ornament. A gift, perhaps, from the man in her life, an artist who worked in acrylics, she'd said.
She took both his hands, pulling him up the steps. "Come on! I'll go crazy if you don't see this right away!"
Her second-floor apartment was full of plain, sunny spaces, and it struck him with a pang how her Amishness showed here too—except that everywhere there were books. She picked one up and handed it to him, then stood back smiling.
Her book.
He had been expecting to see it any time, but the first sight of it had an immense impact on him. He read the cover. Woodsmoke in Winter: Memories of an Amish Girlhood, by Rachel Hostetler.
He opened the cover, smelled the tangy new-paper fragrance, read the title page, the name of the university press publisher, the inscription she had written to him and Susan. He opened the book at random and read.
If there weren't so much to do, my mother would have sat in one spot all her years and watched the moon rise and the sun set and the changing face of the meadows. She loves the world and her place in it.
My father is more restive. There are times when I think he's not so sure of things as he wants to seem. He's careful; careful of his feelings, careful of others.
The younger children are a meld. The images of my parents are less clear in them, but the three of us who are oldest seem like mirrors of our seed. Daniel has the serenity of our mother. I am restless like our father. Susan has both the
peace and the haste. We found roles. Daniel became the peacemaker, I the chronicler, Susan the poet.
It is the hardest for Susan. The world to her is an ingenious puzzle she believes she will never understand. My grandmother used to say that Susan has two gears: all out or full stop. Moods hit her in turns, each one so deep, so convincing, yet different. Two strains, two temperaments, compete in her, and that is one of the things, I think, that draws people to her. She is exciting, and in her own way unpredictable. Although I was taught that envy is a sin, all my life I have admired Susan and envied her. For her serenity. For her ability to bring sunlight into moments of shadow.
Daniel closed the book and took Rachel in his arms, holding her again, the book between them.
"I'm going to come to the farm one day," she said. "I won't stay. I'm just going to give the book to Pop, try to explain, and leave."
They talked and had a beer together. They'd often had beer as teenagers… the drinking was a small secret expression of their rebellion, childish perhaps, but something they did.
He asked, "What do you know about Alan Wilde?"
"You mean the movie director, or producer—whatever he is?"
"That one."
She shrugged. "Just what everyone else knows, I guess. The wonder boy of American films. Former child star. Handsome, and rich as the Pope. What about him?"
"He's making a movie on location in Grey ling." v "You're kidding. I heard they were filming in Wisconsin, but I had no idea it was practically in our—in your backyard. Caused much excitement?"
He was quiet for a moment. Then he took the crumpled envelope out of his back pocket and gave it to her.
"What's this?" She studied it, turning it over. Then she tore it open. And was still. When she spoke her voice was thick with the pain she would not shed as tears. "Do you know what this is?"
"Yes." He had seen it, the check for ten thousand dollars endorsed over to Rachel. And he'd seen Susan's note, which read only, "So you don't need to work. So you can go to school and write. I love you. Susan."
"Dear God, has she sold the farm?"
"No. We don't have that kind of equity in it."
"Then where—"
"She's working for Alan Wilde."
It took her a very long time to assimilate it. He understood. It was impossible to accept the reality of it.
"As what?"
"She says he gave her a part in the movie."
She slapped the check into his hand, her eyes hot. "Give it back to her, please, and tell her to stop being nuts."
"She has a contract."
"So what? Surely under the circumstances it can be broken. She couldn't have had any idea what she was signing."
"She didn't. But they'd already filmed a week and a half before she told me. You can understand the kind of financial commitment it is for them. If she made them lose that kind of money they might come after her in court. I don't know what they could do to her." He took her hand and slowly uncurled her fingers, then put the envelope in it. "You have to keep it, you know, or she will have done it for nothing."
They stayed like that for a while, hands together, not speaking. Then Rachel began to laugh, a strange, painful laugh.
"Oh, Susan, Susan," she said, and laid her head down on his knees. "Did you see? She didn't even think to take money out of it for income tax."
Chapter 10
On Monday morning Susan cried for no reason while they were putting on her makeup. Like a sun-shower, it was over before Alan heard about it and came.
He was his public self, all polished charm and professionalism. No references, however oblique, were made to their heart-catching moments on the bridge. There was no visible display of more than friendly interest or directorial concern.
"Are you nervous about today's shooting?"
"No. It was just silly."
But something had changed between them. Under the polite manners, the spark glowed more hotly. Together they were an island of warmth and light in the crowded trailer. Her senses were restive. Where there had been tears, laughter came. For no reason.
"You may film me. You may take movies of me. You may even process and print me, but you may not shoot me. And it's no wonder that I'm nervous. You only give me the script a bit at a time. I don't know from one day to the next if you'll have that monster make a meal of me."
"I give you the script a piece at a time so that you won't be intimidated by the size of it. The monster won't eat you. I won't shoot you. I promise."
Over the next days, the new feelings multiplied, growing with a strength that was beyond Susan's power to understand, beyond Alan's ability to absorb. Whatever her accomplishments in front of the camera or his behind it, their greatest performances came when they were together. He tried not to scare her. She tried not to scare herself.
The time limit comforted her. In a matter of weeks he would be gone, and that meant her control need not last forever. In the meantime, the feelings were too rich to withstand.
Friendship was the one acceptable path for her. She tried to push her volatile emotions into that category, where all her familiar rules would apply. He watched her efforts to become his friend, his chum, with something akin to awe. It was an illusion so transparent and helpless that even his ingrained cynicism was no match against being moved by it.
He began to know her better.
Susan had no concept of "work." To her, work was play, and play work. A gentle fancy invaded everything she did. When he explained a scene to her, fathoms deep in technicalities, she had a dozen ways to draw him away from it.
Once she deposited a caterpillar on his shirt. As the insect made its bumpy way along the cloth, she gazed up at him with bright eyes and said, "He likes you. He's measuring you for a new suit."
She spent an afternoon break by the stream with him, washing pebbles, showing him the vivid colors they became when they were wet. Another time she brought him a jar of her homemade strawberry jam and held it toward the sun to let him see how the light came inside and made it a jewel. Hardly knowing it, he began to learn about the definitions of wealth and beauty in her world. Vitality began to seep, via him, into the love story between Polly and Adam that he'd written to be no more than a token subplot. Viewing the dailies was becoming an event.
Adam continues his courtship of Polly, but Polly's father, disillusioned by his own marriage, has decreed that the couple must have a long engagement to be sure they both know their own minds. Polly is making a decorative wreath of feathers, an elaborate Victorian ornament. Each time Adam visits, he may give her one feather. When the wreath is completed, they may wed.
Short takes. Polly is framed in the moody light of a rain-streaked window, adding a feather. She adds another on a sunlit afternoon, the kitten cuddled against her cheek. Another, then, in her shadowed bedroom, the candlelight gleaming in the loose waves of her hair.
Then—a shift to a farmhouse. Adam steps from his front door and a barnyard of geese and chickens explodes into panicked flight.
Laughter hummed through the screening room. "When'd you film that?" Ben Rose asked. "While everyone was at lunch," Joan said. "It was just David, Pete, Susan, and me. Pete ran the camera. It was Susan's idea. We thought it'd give you people a chuckle."
Adam's impatience erupts. He slices into the mattress on his bed, scoops up an armful of feathers, and rushes to the inn. Polly is on the porch, enjoying a summery evening with her father, and Adam casts the fluffy mountain on the wooden steps. Polly runs to him, her skirts sweeping the feathers into a hurricane. The stern father's heart melts at the ardency of young love, and he gives his final nod of approval. In an arbor of feathers that swirls around them like apple blossoms, Adam catches Polly to him in an exuberant embrace, lifting her at the waist, and she is laughing, laughing, the expression on her face heart-robbing in its beauty.
David had been pacing restlessly around the screening room, cocaine singing arias in his blood. "Is it love, or is it confusion?" he murmured, su
bjecting the screen to a jaundiced study.
From the back, Max spoke sleepily. "Love—that which impels you to scratch your initials with hers on a bathroom wall. Valium for the masses." He stretched and strolled forward to examine the screen in closer detail. "Damn, that woman is gorgeous. We get ten thousand volts in every closeup."
"She has a European kind of look, don't you think? So much done with the eyes." Joan took a swallow of Scotch. "She makes you think of Isabelle Adjani. The face stays with you."
"Yeah." Ben Rose put his feet up. "It has the classical dialectic: arousing but innocent. Not quite virginal, though.",
"I know what you mean," Max said. "Fragility marked by experience. She looks like a woman who's been with a man. But only one man. A grand passion that's left her wounded, and now every man who looks at her wants to take her to bed and heal the scars. You do a great job with her, David."
"Thank you. I didn't have any choice. Besides, I think she's going to be a star."
"Not according to her," Joan said. "She swears up and down this is the one and only movie in her life."
Ben laughed. "That'll change as soon as she gets an idea of the bucks coming her way. By the way, what did you decide to do with the bedroom scene, Alan? Is she going to play the whole thing by herself?"
"No. We've hired a double."
"What a headache that was." loan let Max take a sip of her Scotch, "Susan has these incredible proportions—tiny, but with long legs. That's why when you look at her on film without a point of reference, she looks tall. Casting finally put their hands on a runway model who does petite fashions. The features don't match, but c'est la vie." She frowned. "By the way, has Susan been told?"
David rested his palms on Joan's shoulders, absently massaging them. "It hardly matters, does it?"
"Of course it doesn't matter," Ben said irritably. "Fortunately, there isn't a damn thing she can do about it. If she doesn't like it, she can count herself lucky we had the sensitivity not to make her do it." He glanced sideways. "You off to bed, Alan?"