When Edith left the bank with twenty brand-new Canadian dollars in her purse, she headed straight for Newton’s Bakery, though in the usual course of events she would have stopped by Rose Cottage first for a cup of tea. The rest of Mr. Enderby’s story had included the full roster of Mr. Brown sightings from the day before, but none of them were as urgent as the one connecting Sabra Jane to the man in the pin stripes and wing-tipped shoes. That morning the women at Whale Cove puzzled over the man’s attire as much as Constable Daggett had. Willa even suggested that if Edith hadn’t been there, the man’s death would have been presumed a suicide or a tourist’s mistake. Now it seemed Edith was also to be responsible for the accusations beginning to swirl around Sabra Jane Briggs. Edith wanted to know more about Sabra Jane’s encounter with this Mr. John T. Brown outside the bakery. And fast.
THE trouble was, Edith thought, stirring fresh milk into her tea, the flowers on the teal green wallpaper at Rose Cottage her only company for the moment, no one in the bakery saw Sabra Jane Briggs talking with Mr. Brown. Both Emma Parker and Jesse Martin remembered Sabra Jane in the red shirt. She had purchased two loaves of St. John’s bread. And they remembered Mr. Brown. He purchased three biscuits. They recalled seeing several other people as well, Little John Winslow among them, but no two together and no one at all in the company of Mr. Brown.
“He was alone,” Emma Parker’s nod was decisive, her gray curls bounced once.
“He didn’t seem a bit nervous or anything. Not like he was thinking of dying,” Jesse Martin interrupted. “And then there were the three biscuits. Whatever happened to them? I heard they weren’t in his room at The Swallowtail.”
“Not nervous,” Emma Parker agreed. “But he wasn’t friendly, either. Sort of pinched he was around the eyes and nose,” she pursed her mouth and squinched her eyes, trying to catch his look. “I can’t say as I liked him. Jesse neither.”
“Well, I didn’t dislike him exactly. I didn’t know the man,” Jesse Martin demurred, her blue eyes widening. “But I didn’t like him, that’s true. He seemed not quite nice, if you know what I mean. All tight and sort of beaky,” she opened and closed the fingers on her right hand, pulling them toward and away from her face, trying in another way to convey his expression. “And maybe a bit mean-spirited.” Her voice was thoughtful. “It didn’t bother him a whit to break off some scone and stand there nibbling, then choose the biscuits. Not a may I, not a thank you, not a nothing.”
“I’d have called him persnickety if he were a woman,” Emma Parker giggled. Emma Parker never giggled. “But he was no woman. Not that one,” her voice returned to its usual deadpan. “He had a leer about him. I don’t mean he liked women. I didn’t get the feeling he did. Just that he had nastiness in his eyes.”
EDITH sipped her tea, investigated the roses on the wallpaper, and thought about the men they knew. Not one of them was mean-spirited, nor did they wear pin-striped suits or wing-tipped shoes. They didn’t know many men on Grand Manan except for the village doctor, who was learned and sympathetic and helpful, especially to Willa during those painful periods when from some undiagnosed malady she could not write and had to keep her hand in a splint. Among Edith’s colleagues at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency that continued to consume at least six to eight months of every one of her years, even the most competitive men were generally pleasant to work with, mannerly and well intentioned. The men they counted among their friends—Alfred Knopf, Bruce Barton, Sam McClure, John Phillips, Edith began parading them through in a mental review—were without exception honest and accessible. They met her approval. Some, a few, Edith considered actually wise.
Rudolph Ruzicka and Earl Brewster at the very least aspired toward wisdom, Edith smiled to herself. Twenty years ago, during their early studio days on Washington Square, Rudolph and Earl had been among Willa and Edith’s closest friends. Both were artists, Rudolph an engraver, Earl a painter. And, oh, such energy, Edith grinned at her tea cup. After a full day at McClure’s, where Willa and Edith both worked as editors, they would come home to argue half the night with Rudolph and Earl. Long, meandering arguments. And silly, since all of them fundamentally agreed, but the talk itself was exciting.
“Creative genius be damned,” Rudolph would declare, his voice firm. Rudolph was a quiet, gentle man, but passionate about his art. Later Willa would ask that he illustrate My Antonia, but these long evenings were early in their friendship. “Craftsmanship, that’s what counts. Craftsmanship and honest sympathy with the subject. Not genius, not schools, not art-ificiality,” Rudolph would pause after the first syllable to make his meaning clear. “Craft and sympathy. Those make the artist.” Earl or Willa and sometimes Edith would respond. Then for hours upon hours they would dissect individual artists and their works, Burne-Jones, Chase, Sloan, one of the upstarts like Matisse, or examine writers like Hawthorne, Howells, James, and the young radicals hanging around Dreiser.
Back then Willa felt increasingly desperate for time to practice her own craft, but she also had a great deal to contribute to their conversations. Edith sometimes caught echoes from Willa’s early commentary in the Lincoln newspapers where she labeled Oscar Wilde the leader of insincerity and his “epigrammatic school” of aesthetics dangerous in its assumption that society could improve upon nature.
During those long argumentative evenings, Willa’s voice would remain steady but her words were urgent. “If the choice were only between aesthetics and genius, I’d have to choose genius every time. Genuine genius,” her hands moving as though they were conducting a choir building toward crescendo, “untrained, elemental, primitive, sensuous, amoral, perhaps. But genius. Genius as full of the joy of life as the old barbarians. Genius like Whitman’s, whose reckless rhapsodies in Song of Myself,” she’d smile at the superfluity of alliteration, “might very well have been written by a joyous elephant who just happened to break into song.”
Edith distinctly remembered Rudolph’s laughter and her own giddy vision of an enormous gray beast in crushed hat, flowing scarf, and rumpled suit cavorting among fields of flowers and rising on powerful hind legs only to toss his head and trumpet glad-hearted lyrics to the open blue sky.
“No Barnum and Bailey for a gay blade like Whitman, eh?” Rudolph’s laughter had filled the room then and again when Willa opened fire on writers who fell victim to America’s appetite for stars.
“Of course it happens elsewhere. It happened to Wilde and even to Whitman,” Willa contended. “George Sand, too, a little, but probably not until she became George,” Willa smiled at the aside, then let her voice rise, “and they let it happen, all of them, like Faust.”
“And what about Marguerite,” Rudolph began to tease but Willa ignored him. She had been through too many discussions comparing the aspirations of women artists to their relative worth as muses for men to get sidetracked by false issues like Faust’s Marguerite.
“Well, audiences do demand that artists be bigger and better than life, but the artists don’t have to deliver,” Rudolph admonished with a sharp intake of breath.
No one responded until Willa leaned forward, “Audiences demand sentimentality from women artists,” her right index finger tapped hard against the surface of the table, “but the best don’t give in. George Sand never did, George Eliot either. The two Georges,” she mused, “and Sappho, the greatest of women writers,” then added her own teaser, “but somehow men seem to find it harder to resist fame than women do the sentimentality men complain so much about.”
“Sympathy’s okay, not sentiment,” Rudolph insisted.
They all nodded. Edith remembered how straight the lines of their mouths had been fixed at that moment.
Finally Earl snatched Willa’s bait, “Why resist fame?”
Willa settled deeper into her chair and hooked both heels on the rung below before answering. “You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that men do say a great deal about women and sentimentality,” she paused to look him in the eye, “but almost nothing about
men and fame?”
“Yes,” Earl drawled it out, stalling while he figured the loopholes and consequences of his admission. Earl might be a gentle man and generous, but he did not like to be wrong.
“Oh,” Willa broke in to concede with a sweep of her arm, “men used to talk about fame a great deal. ‘That last infirmity of a noble mind,’ Milton called it. And before Milton and before the Renaissance, men talked about fame all the time. With great anxiety. Hardly talked about anything else. Considered it part of Pride, the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins. It got in the way of absolutely everything, they said. The farther back you go, the more anxiety you’ll find about it. People refused to sign names to what they did,” Willa brushed one hand against the other as if she were erasing records. “Names weren’t important. Homer got attached to the Iliad, but we don’t know who Homer was any more than we know who painted pictographs or the symbols in caves.”
Both men lit up with the reference to visual art. “Well, names are important now,” Earl pointed out. “All you hear about is the artist, not his paintings. One painting often stands for all he’s done.”
“Exactly my point,” Willa laughed. “And in case you haven’t noticed, for all we know, all painters are male. Those we consider important, anyway,” Willa paused. “Now men pursue fame. Fame’s certainly no problem any more. For men, that is. Women who pursue it come off as silly. But men are important, men can be famous. It’s so American,” she finally sighed, “and so wrong headed.”
“American, yes, but wrong headed?” Rudolph challenged.
“Wrong headed, yes. Why carry on so about individuals,” Willa demanded. “And why get the myth of creative genius all mixed up with stories about artists’ personal lives? Or better yet, why let journalists get them all mixed up? It’s what we do that matters, not who we are. Deeds. Actions. Art. Not individuals or personalities.”
Earl cleared his throat. “That sounds pretty old fashioned,” he finally said, “almost old-time religious.”
“Well, old time stays in fashion sometimes,” Edith finally entered the argument. “Milton and Spenser and those other Renaissance fellows did think a certain kind of personality important. But they called it character, the kind Everyman should have. Milton himself said it took a good man to produce great art.”
“Good character, great art, yes,” Willa agreed, “but what I am talking about is older fashioned than Milton. Maybe even pre-church religious,” she paused to grin at Earl. “Just think about it. All this genius talk and personal gossip just puffs men up beyond the limits of sense and human gravity. Enlarged heads are only the beginning,” she chuckled. “Once started, their reputations swell them up altogether and carry them off like the hot air balloons at Coney Island. First they bloat and start to look distended,” Willa puffed up her cheeks and shoved her belly out until it pushed against the table, “and then they preen and dance and swagger through the air.”
Edith giggled again at the image, remembering how Willa rose to whirl about the room like an awkward, pregnant Isadora Duncan. “Readers no longer see writers’ works, only those floating Kewpie doll figures filled with their own hot air,” Willa’s words came slowly, each following a swirl. When she sat back down, her expression turned serious and intense, “How the Great Man as Artist or, for that matter, a Silly Woman Writer can expect readers to achieve empathetic identification with what’s going on in their novels when they refuse to get out of the way of their pages is beyond me,” and she thumped her hand hard upon the table. Willa had been so forceful, so adamant, her whole body so involved in her words, that at that moment the legs collapsed from under her chair.
Earl, springing forward to bring her back to her feet, laughed, “Well, that certainly fell flat, didn’t it?”
But it hadn’t, of course, and now Willa’s collapse served to punctuate Edith’s memory. Edith also remembered Rudolph’s surprise at the questions that followed about why it was all so much worse when the Great Man was female. Edith had guessed that it was because of the different standards people used to judge the personal lives of men and women. Willa had said it amounted to three little words, all of them capitalized, Women Should Not.
Rudolph and Earl had come a long way toward wisdom since then, and Willa claimed that those long nights of talk with Rudolph at the helm were the some of most decisive moments in her career. That’s when, she said, she moved from pretending to be in Bohemia to being there. They also learned a great deal from Earl about painting and religion and, more recently, about meditation. He was already wise enough then to marry Edith’s college roommate, Edith smiled to herself, though why Earl had to cart Achsah off half way around the world, Edith would never fully understand or approve. She wanted them closer. As painters, Earl and Achsah loved the light on Capri, but now Earl was translating the writings of Buddha, and they were talking about moving to India. Achsah’s letters were full of the plan. They expected D. H. Lawrence and Frieda, two of their closest friends, to go along. And they wanted Edith and Willa to join them.
Well, Lawrence might go, Edith refilled her cup, but she knew Willa would desist. Edith replaced the pot and glanced out the window, her eyes settling momentarily on Rob Feeney, whose uniformed back was just then entering the bank. Edith’s inner eye glimpsed the passage of the S. S. Grand Manan as it crossed the mouth of Whale Cove. Feeney was a nice fellow, always teasing Edith about seasickness at the same time he tried to make her passage as comfortable as possible.
When they built the cottage on Grand Manan, Willa declared that twenty miles off the tip of Maine was as far from the United States as she wanted to be for any extended period. And not just because of Edith’s regular bouts of seasickness. They had already tried France. After all, with Earl and Achsah and Jan and Isabelle within a day’s journey of each other and the cost of living so much less abroad, moving to France or Italy seemed sensible. Especially once Willa’s own fame took hold. But after only a few months, they began to feel disconnected. From themselves, not just from the country or the people they knew. Insulation from crowds and hectic schedules, yes, they both needed that. But they also needed immersion. It was important for them and especially for Willa to hear the nuances and feel the pace of their own country. It was a writer’s life blood, Willa finally had determined. Her life blood. Not to experience the language and cadence of America, Willa guessed, meant that she would become a different writer or perhaps no writer at all. That was a price neither of them chose to pay.
But men, Edith realized she had digressed into woolgathering. Nice men. Mean men. Men had nothing to do with their decision. One man in particular, however, might have a great deal to do with Sabra Jane’s ability to make any decisions at all from now on. Surely there was a mistake here.
EDITH tried again to see what surrounded the red shirt that had so centrally occupied her mind’s eye. This was like working a motion picture film. Edith tried slowing the reel of her memory to inspect the image with the shirt frame by frame. But her eye fixed the scene in considerably less detail than a camera might have. Or perhaps the problem was focus. She had been too far away to catch the sharp features necessary for distinguishing the sex or identity of the person in the shirt. She was sure it was the person’s back, though she couldn’t say exactly why. The pattern of the movements, she guessed, told her that. The way the arm flung itself out, perhaps that was it. The legs, she recalled, seemed to be spread. Yes, the person wore pants. Black pants, brown pants, blue, she couldn’t tell. But dark, darker than the blaze of red above or the rocks below. Boots, shoes. She couldn’t say. She looked again toward the head. Dark, darker than a face would be, Edith thought. But she caught no hint of color or length of hair. Probably short, she guessed, unless the person was wearing a close hat, something knitted, perhaps. Not likely, the way the day had warmed up.
What was there, Edith wondered, among the things she could remember about this shirted figure to separate it from Sabra Jane Briggs. Sabra Jane wore her hair bobbed and shingled i
n the back, so that was no help, and its color didn’t matter. The color of the shirt could easily have been the red Sabra Jane wore, and the person seemed to have a waist, the shirt tucked in just as Sabra Jane’s had been. Her jodhpurs had been a mahogany brown that day and her boots the tall lace-ups she customarily wore. Could the person have been wearing those boots? Maybe. Maybe not. All Edith could say for certain was that the legs had been spread, the figure’s final pose like a ballet dancer’s or the flourish of a star who wants the audience to recognize with applause the rest of the cast. Why had the arm flung itself out? Edith had no idea.
“AND then, you know, he never took the time to unpack.” Edith’s thought was interrupted by the jangle of a bell and voices from the next room, where the entrance to Rose Cottage was located. “He just opened one bag and left it there.”
“And left his bird book on the bed,” another voice, this one male, interjected before greeting Mary, the young waitress Edith and Willa so much enjoyed. The voice asked for a table for four. They wanted an early luncheon, it said, because they were planning an afternoon at Hole in the Wall.
Mary appeared, leading two couples into the dining room. They crossed to a table on the wall opposite. The young men were wearing the white pants, sweaters, and canvas shoes of tennis players. The women wore jodhpurs and short boots. The brunette was in the process of removing a smart pork-pie hat. She and the blond settled into chairs their husbands held for them. One of the men smiled in Edith’s direction. Edith looked out the window toward the dock to inspect the fishing boats tied up there. Too many gushers tried to get an introduction to Willa through her. Edith had learned to discourage strangers even when Willa was not present.
On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery Page 4