It was only cranberry punch, but it would be harder to soak out than blood. Sissy tried to cover the stain with her hair. She had stopped smiling.
“Why did you do that?” Irini whispered. She couldn’t imagine a reason. She had been frightened when she thought Sissy was bleeding, so now she was irritated to have been frightened for nothing.
“I didn’t think I could.” Sissy wiped her mouth with her sleeve, watching Irini. “I wouldn’t have done it if I thought I could.” She looked as if she might cry. Irini turned around to make sure no one had noticed them. Then she stooped down, picked up the small bite of glass and dropped it into what remained of Sissy’s punch.
“Hide it,” she advised.
Sissy looked around in confusion.
“Oh, for goodness sake.” Irini opened the door to the library and stepped inside, gesturing for Sissy to follow. She pulled two volumes, the comedies and the histories, of a four-volume Shakespeare from a shelf, and Sissy set the glass behind them.
Walter Collins entered the room just as she was replacing the books. He was home from school for the holidays. When Irini had seen him last, they had been the same height. He must have grown at least two inches. It made him skinnier as well as taller. He was wearing a thin, green sweater, very Ivy League and not at all appropriate for winter in Magrit, a season that demanded bulk. He had an out-of-town haircut, so a clump of dark blond hair was continually falling into his eyes. It was just a bit Hitlerian, even with the blondness, and he had stopped cutting it this way during the war. But now he pushed it back with one hand. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said.
This was rather rude, even if true, since he hadn’t seen Irini in months, since he hadn’t even said hello first, since it was Christmastime, and he could easily have said Merry Christmas instead. He didn’t speak to Sissy at all. Irini’s irritation shifted smoothly from Sissy to Walter.
“Then we’ll leave.” Irini took hold of Sissy’s shoulder.
“You don’t have to. As long as you’re with me.”
“We were leaving anyway.” Irini pushed past Walter, pulling Sissy with her.
So it was a shock when Henry Collins, dressed all in red, made his entrance from the library. He threaded his way slowly through the library doors, his sled smoking beneath him. What if he had seen her with Sissy in the library? What would she answer if he asked, in that loud voice, had she been a good girl?
“Are you having fun, Irini?” her father asked her. His words were sloppy; he must have brought a bottle to the party. The combination of drink and Christmas made him impossibly sincere. Soon he would be singing carols. He would insist on a solo—“Silent Night” in the original German or something long and Latin. The Collinses would indulge him and his voice would shake with honest sentiment. Irini edged away, choosing a place off to the side of the rug where she could not possibly be suspected of being his daughter.
The room was becoming uncomfortably hot and the continual sound of the sled motor was unpleasant. She moved even farther off from the rest of the partyers. She was halfway up the stairs when Walter Collins caught up with her. “You’re not allowed up there, either,” he said. “But I could take you. Gramps has got a ham radio set. We can get Greenland. I’ll show you how.”
He was being so pompous, as if they had not known each other for years, as if he had not once put peanuts in his ears just to amuse her and then had to have Dr. Gilbertsen come to the house and fish one of them out.
One step on the stairs was taller than the others. Henry Collins had designed this as an antitheft feature. If it worked as planned, the burglar, negotiating his way in the dark, his arms full of valuables, would be surprised by the sudden drop and fall and break his neck and they would find him at the bottom of the stairs in the morning. Years later Ada would worry about a way to reconcile this karmic design feature with the principles of ahimsa. This was the step Irini sat down on, ignoring Walter. He sat beside her.
At the party beneath them, the sled coughed twice and hiccoughed once and was silent. “I could probably fix that for you,” Norma offered, but she was in her good clothes so Henry said no.
For a moment, no one else spoke. The silence was lovely. “An angel is visiting,” her father would have said to her, had she been near enough to hear him. There were few enough silences when he was around.
Walter spoke. “Same old Christmas. Same old Magrit.”
“Same old Walter.” It was a suggestion, not an observation.
“You bet.” Walter leaned back on his elbows and stretched his legs. His hair fell forward. He pushed it back. “Do you like the punch? Here.” He picked up her juice from the step beneath her. “You better hold on to this. The glasses are heirlooms. Ada would be hysterical if you broke one.” Ada wasn’t his grandmother and he never pretended that she was.
“So you saw.”
“Saw what?”
“You know perfectly well what.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Doyle.” Walter took a sip out of her glass and grinned at her. “Good punch. Refreshing.”
“Sissy did it. I was trying to help out.”
“Kiss me and I won’t tell,” Walter said.
This seemed fair enough. Irini looked around to make sure no one could see them and then she let him kiss her. It was her first kiss and it was a silent, lip-bumping affair. There was nothing particularly nice about it. She wondered if she was supposed to have made the smacking sound or if he should have. He appeared more satisfied with the result than she was. When he smiled, his upper lip rose so high you could see the pink line of his gums.
“I wouldn’t really have told,” he said. “I never tell on you. Do I?”
“I know.”
“Kiss me again.”
“No,” said Irini. Enough was enough.
The sound of Irini’s father’s voice drifted up the stairs. “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.” He needed Irini to pitch his songs for him. This one was way too high. He was never going to hit the himm- in himmlicher Ruh. But she didn’t feel as embarrassed in front of Walter as she would have in front of anyone else. When her father came to the word “virgin” it would be in German and Walter probably wouldn’t even recognize it. Her father had sung in church choir as a boy and always been given the solos. His voice was not so sweet now, but even Irini, who was only thirteen and also didn’t really listen, because it was her own father, could hear how sweet it might have been once, before he started to smoke, before he lost his wife, before he knew he would spend his life working at Margaret Mill.
This was the last song in German Irini’s father would be singing for quite some time. The date of the party was December 6, 1941. Henry Collins made a toast. “As we meet tonight, may we meet again. Each and every one of us. God bless.”
Maggie Collins writes: “In the unfortunate event that, as a guest in someone’s home, you should break a dish or stain a tablecloth, or do another sort of damage, you enter at once into a negotiation similar to the bidding process in contract bridge. You must offer, of course, to repair and repay. This opens the bidding. Your partner in the affair, the host, must refuse the first such offer, no matter how treasured the item, no matter how heart-breaking the damage. The first offer is merely pro forma.
“The second round separates the experts from the amateurs. The courteous guest will repeat the offer. It may be that repair or replacement is not actually possible, but this determination is not for the guest to make. This judgment belongs to the host, who must ask himself not only if it is possible, but the more delicate question, is it within the means of this particular guest? It is on these points that your partner, the host, chooses to accept or refuse.
“In the case of refusal, negotiations may move to a third round. The guest may offer again. Here, timing is critical. If the offer comes immediately after the second refusal, it suggests that you as guest feel the host has misjudged your abilities or your pocketbook. Perhaps you have a cousin in the antiqu
e business who specializes in matching patterns. Perhaps you have an aunt who tats. If the offer immediately follows the refusal, your partner is free to accept. But if the third offer comes later in the evening, if it comes, for example, as you are putting on your coat and saying your farewells, then it is merely another expression of regret and not to be mistaken for a serious offer. It ought again to be refused. Mind you, by making it, you risk acceptance. It may well be that your partner is not as sophisticated in these negotiations as you are.
“In any case, the matter is settled in three rounds and a fourth is not only unnecessary, but also rude.”
That night after they’d returned from the party and Irini had gone to bed, her father sat up with his bottle in the kitchen. If he drank enough, he saw things, heard things. Only they were never the things he wanted to see or hear. So he had been forced to keep drinking all those years, until he got it right.
Someday he might find himself, just for a few minutes, in an older kitchen. There was a clock on the wall. He had broken it himself years ago, just because the sound was such a heartbeat to him, but someday he would hear that tick again, follow it to a woman standing at the sink, drying dishes.
Her voice would come next. She was singing and she couldn’t carry a tune at all. She flipped the dishrag in his direction, came to sit beside him. She stretched his arm out onto the table, and laid her head and hair over it.
“I miss you,” he would be able to tell her then. Never so drunk he couldn’t get that out. The kitchen would smell of pot roast, caramelized onions, strong coffee. “Don’t leave me here.”
But then we all have someone we miss. No big deal. Nothing special about that.
11
I have already told you how Henry Collins drowned Upper Magrit, but there is more to the story. He had to hire outside help to do it. There must have been men in Magrit at that time who had the disposition for the job, if not the expertise. There must have been men who, for a paycheck, would have followed instructions. They were already doing so up in Canada—felling trees, digging mines, laying steel, blasting and paving everything they could touch. And keep in mind that the project in Magrit had community support.
Still, there were obviously going to be hard feelings. Better, Henry reasoned, to bring someone in, have him blow the place, and then leave again. The bad feelings might just settle on him and leave when he left.
Henry sent south for Jim Nedd and his crew of colored engineers. Jim Nedd was a freed slave who’d been highly thought of until he published a paper offering to straighten the Mississippi. Most of his work had involved the river; he was quite familiar with its notorious curves and shallows.
After publication, he was generally regarded as a crackpot. There hadn’t been a job offer since. But it was this same paper that drew Henry’s attention to him. Henry was impressed with the audacity of the project as well as beguiled by the project itself. A Mississippi River that ran straight as the crow flies from the top of the country to the bottom. It was beautiful. It was farsighted. Someday, if the unruly river couldn’t be brought to heel, someday there would be hell to pay.
Henry and Nedd were men of vision—visionaries, both of them, surrounded by myopics. Jim Nedd was asked to come and look at Upper Magrit.
Compared to straightening the Mississippi, it was a simple enough project. The pay was good. The crew could camp on land Henry had purchased for the purpose and not mingle too much with the locals. Jim Nedd had accepted the job and sent for his crew before he began to have second thoughts.
He was out one morning, pacing off the area under the baleful eyes of Upper Magrit, when he noticed the Dumas place. The Dumas had been Quaker converts and had lived in a white house with a brick chimney. It was the chimney that caught Nedd’s eye. Down the side of the bricks, someone, long, long ago, had painted a white stripe.
It was 1898, but Nedd knew what that stripe meant. Friends here, it said. Safety. Shelter. Food. Many years ago the Dumas House had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Nedd walked away quickly, careful not to speak to the current occupants.
Nedd’s crew arrived, and they spent several days setting up their camp. Henry spent the same time overseeing the evacuation of Upper Magrit. He sold off lots he’d just purchased in the Lower to the displaced families of the Upper. There was a profit involved, of course, and Upper Magrit noticed, but it was not a large profit, as Lower Magrit was quick to point out. Building a mill was bound to cost money; naturally Henry would need to turn a profit wherever he could. The first payments went immediately into the wages of Nedd’s crew. Henry occupied himself quarreling with and cajoling Madame Nadeau. It was several days before he noticed that no work was being done. Any delay gave the Nadeau boys that much more time to get down from Canada.
Henry bicycled up to Upper Magrit. The whole country had been gripped by a great bicycle mania, and Henry was one of the first and most severely hit of the victims. The day he saw his first bicycle, he swore he would never own a horse again. “What a steed!” he had said, even after his first attempts at riding landed him in the dirt. “What a steed!”
“Work starting soon?” he asked Nedd, swinging off the cycle and dropping it.
“Soon,” Nedd answered. “It’s simple enough. Place the dynamite in the right spots and the whole thing will flood. Then we just blast a channel where we want the water to fall.”
Two days later no dynamite had been placed. Henry pedaled up the hill again. “Everything ready to go?” he said. “You have everything you need?”
“Setting the dynamite is delicate,” Nedd told him. “It’s not just a matter of placing it correctly. The men who light it, they have to be in the right mood. It’s too dangerous to ask a man who’s not in the right mood to do it.”
“Who’s not in the right mood?” Henry asked.
“I’m not,” Nedd answered.
“I see,” said Henry. “And I’m not in the right mood to pay a man who’s not in the right mood to work. Shall we start tomorrow? I’ll come up and watch.”
The next day Nedd paced off Upper Magrit again. “I’m going to have to dismantle the chimney,” he told Henry, pointing to the Dumas place. “It’s too high. It’s going to affect the cross-flow.”
“Dynamite it first,” Henry suggested. “Then dynamite the rest.”
“No need,” said Nedd. It took him two additional days. He chiseled the bricks carefully apart, trying not to break any. Then he stacked them on the high ground. When Upper Magrit was underwater and the crew had been paid for their work and sent home, Nedd stayed on. He made a tower of the bricks, two walls that sloped upward and met in a corner. He mortared them into place. When Henry asked, Nedd said it was a signature; he was signing his work. From the air, the bricks were an arrowhead, pointing due north.
Nedd returned south. Magrit decided that he had been a crackpot after all. But no one could quarrel with his work. Upper Magrit was deep and silent and dangerous. The falls had more than trebled in size and strength.
Irini had never wondered why there was a brick tower on the shores of Upper Magrit. She had never heard anyone else wonder either, not even the Leggetts, who were the only surviving descendants of the Dumas family. Helen Leggett worked right there in the Kitchen and even she had never heard the name Jim Nedd.
For the children of Magrit, the bricks were there to be climbed over, there to be jumped from, there to be written on. Years ago Walter had painted his name and Irini’s among the other pairs. It had made Irini so angry he had never renewed it. Year after year it grew fainter and fainter and this year, when she looked, it wasn’t there at all.
Irini took it as an omen that Walter was not coming home. In California Walter lived right on the ocean and dove for abalone. He pounded and breaded the meat and used the shells as ashtrays, the sort of thrift and ingenuity that Maggie Collins was always encouraging. He’d seen the grunion run. He’d surfed on canvas sheets filled with wind and tied off to hold the air as long as the ride lasted. Did
you return from this to a town where winter never ended, and to someone who didn’t love you back? Irini hoped that even Walter had more pride than that.
I told you that Walter had not come back to Magrit after being discharged, but there is more to the story. Once Walter had thought he would come home from the war and marry Irini. He’d made the mistake of asking. Ironically, the fact that he was willing to come back to Magrit had worked against him. Irini couldn’t imagine that anyone with anything on the ball would come back to Magrit. And she had turned out to be right, although she could have eliminated the qualifying clause.
When Irini said no, she had thought she would have other options. She’d thought the war itself would give her other options. It wasn’t that she planned never to marry. But someday Irini expected to be sick with love for someone. Even now, with prospects so demonstrably bleak, Irini expected passion. She thought that everyone got to fall in love. She thought that this was just the way things worked. The Master Plan. She didn’t imagine that even a war could stop it.
Irini could already make herself feel this way, even though she had never felt this way. She had learned from books and movies and songs. She practiced now and then to keep herself in shape, and she tried it again that day, standing at Nedd’s tower, looking at the unmarked bricks where her name had been. Sure enough, she could make herself so weak with love, her legs would hardly hold her.
She reset herself to simmer. She was nineteen. Simmer was her normal temperature.
Irini never told anyone that he’d asked. They all thought she was still waiting for him, and they all felt sorry over it. Irini told herself it was only right that she look a little pathetic on Walter’s behalf, since he suffered the drawbacks of actually being pathetic. It evened things up a bit.
The Sweetheart Season Page 9