“I’m fine, Gertrude,” I say, attempting to fend her off.
“Oh, I know you have to say that,” she stage whispers. “You are so brave, Christina.”
“I’m not.”
She squeezes my hand. “You are, you are! After all you’ve been through. I would crawl into a hole.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I would! I would just collapse. You are so . . .” She sticks her lip out in a pretend pout. “You always make the best of things. I admire that so much.”
And just like that, I’ve had enough. I close my eyes, take a breath, open them. “Well, see, now, I admire you.”
She puts a hand on her chest. “Really?”
“Yes. I think it would be hard to have such a slender sister, when you try so desperately to watch your weight. That doesn’t seem fair at all.”
She stands erect. Pulls her stomach in. Bites her lip. “I hardly think—”
“It must be very difficult.” Reaching out, I pat her shoulder. “Everybody says so.”
I know I’m being unkind, but I can’t help myself. And I don’t regret it when I see the hurt look on her face. My heart is shattered, and all that’s left are jagged shards.
MOTHER HAS BEGUN spending entire days in her bedroom with the shades drawn. Dr. Heald comes and goes, trying to figure out what is wrong. I hover in the shadows out of his way. “It appears that she has a progressive kidney disease and possibly a heart condition,” he tells us finally. “She needs to rest. When she feels up to it, she can venture out into the sunshine.”
She has good days and bad. On bad days, she doesn’t come out of her room. (When she calls for tea, I make my way up the stairs slowly, rattling the teacup in its saucer, splashing the hot liquid on my hand.) On good days, she appears after I’ve finished washing the breakfast dishes and sits with me in the kitchen. Now and then, when she’s feeling particularly well, we’ll take a picnic to Little Island, timing our walks to the ebb of the tide. We are quite a pair: a sickly woman short of breath and a lame girl lurching alongside.
Mother keeps Mamey’s black bible, worn and faded from years of travel, on the table beside her bed, and often thumbs through its gossamer pages. Now and then she murmurs the words aloud she knows by heart: We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope . . . For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison . . .
One morning I come to the barn to bring Papa a jug of water and find him slumped against the mule in its stall, a strange grimace on his face. Startled, I drop the cup and stumble forward.
“Help me, Christina,” he gasps, reaching out a hand. “I can’t get up.” His muscles constrict and spasm; his legs are so painful, he says, that he can barely move them. When I finally get him into the house, he lies on the floor of the kitchen and kneads his calves, trying to dull the pain.
Al goes to fetch Dr. Heald. After examining Papa, he announces that it must be arthritis, and there’s not much he can do.
With Mother in and out of bed and Papa increasingly infirm, the duties of the household fall even more heavily on my brothers and me. We have no choice, or the whole farm will slide into entropy—animals unfed, the cows needing milking, tasks doubled for the next day. To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.
AS SUMMER TURNS to fall, envelopes with two-cent stamps postmarked Boston begin to arrive for me at the post office again. Ramona’s “small family wedding,” she reports, has grown, predictably, into a more lavish affair. Her dress will be modern, despite her mother’s objections—a white satin V-neck with a skirt just below the knee, a wide satin belt, and a bridal cap veil (not, God forbid, her grandmother’s, with its crumbling yellowed lace). “If suffragettes can picket the White House, I can express my emancipation from long skirts and old veils,” Ramona declares. She will carry a bouquet of irises like the bride on the cover of Hearst’s magazine.
The invitation—on thick cream card stock, hand-painted with pastel flowers—arrives in an oversized cream envelope. I stand in the road and read the words etched in florid black script:
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Carle
Respectfully request the honor of your presence
At the marriage ceremony of their daughter
Ramona Jane
And Harland Woodbury . . .
Equally respectfully, on notebook paper, I decline to attend. My brothers are busy with the harvest and I must prepare for the holidays, but we all send our best wishes to the happy couple. (And later a silverplate tea service marked down on sale at a home goods shop in Thomaston.)
After the wedding, held in early November, I receive a honeymoon postcard postmarked Newport—“Such magnificent houses! All the ladies here wear furs”—and, a few weeks later, a note describing the sunny apartment in a new brick building that the newlyweds are renting in Boston. “You must come and visit in early spring. I know Al will be busy with the planting, so bring dear Sam,” Ramona writes. “He needs an adventure, and so do you. It’s neither haying nor holiday season, so no excuses. A few weeks only! Nothing will be disrupted.”
The idea of traveling to Boston under such vastly different circumstances than the one I envisioned sends me to bed with a headache for the afternoon.
“YOU KNOW WE can’t possibly go,” I tell Sam when he confronts me with the letter, which I foolishly left open on the dining room table.
“Why not?”
“The distance . . . my infirmity—”
“Nonsense,” Sam says. “I’ve never been anywhere. Nor have you. We’re going.”
Looking at tall, handsome Sam, with his strong jaw and aquiline nose and piercing gray eyes, I think of all those seafaring Samuels he was named after, setting off to explore the world. Sam is twenty years old. Ramona is right—he needs an adventure. “You go,” I urge him.
“Not without you.”
“But—Al can’t manage the farm on his own.”
“He’s not on his own. Fred is here. And Papa will help.”
I give him a skeptical look. Papa hasn’t been much help for a while now.
“Al will be fine. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
So it is that early on a March morning in 1918, despite my trepidation, Al drives us through the fog to Thomaston, where Sam and I will catch a train bound for North Union Station in Boston. The staircases and ticket lines, narrow hallways and train platforms are a bewildering obstacle course for both of us, made even more difficult by my tight new shoes. Sam carries both suitcases and an overcoat and still manages to keep a firm arm under mine, steadying me as we slowly make our way toward the gate. When we finally get to our railway car, we collapse onto the red leather seats.
A few minutes after we’ve left the station, Sam asks, “Got anything to eat?”
I had packed a few dry biscuits in my bag, but when I pull them out, they crumble in my hand. Just as I’m thinking we might have to wait until Boston, the conductor, a red-faced man with a bristly mustache, happens along to collect our tickets. Sam fumbles through his jacket for them. “Let me guess,” the conductor says. “First time on a train?”
I nod.
“Thought so.” He leans over the seat. “Lavatories are in the next car . . .” He points a meaty finger toward the right. “And the dining room is four cars down. You can get a hot meal or a cup of tea. Or whiskey, if you prefer,” he says, chuckling. His breath is briny, like lobster.
“Thank you,” I say. But after he moves along, I tell Sam, “I don’t think we should. We need to budget.” We’ve brought $80 for the entire visit; the round-trip fare has already eaten up $5.58 each. But I’m also reluctant to make a spectacle of myself, jerking back and forth.
“What we need to do is eat,” Sam says.
“You go and bring me something small.”
Sam kn
ows what I’m thinking. Four long cars. He stands with a flourish and holds out his arm. I take a deep breath and rise to my feet. But now there’s another question: Do we take our things with us so they won’t be stolen, or do we leave them here? An elderly woman with a face like a cellar apple leans forward in her seat across the aisle. “Don’t worry, dears, I’ll watch your bags.”
The swaying of the train actually disguises my infirmity. Accustomed to having to work to keep my balance, I adjust to it more quickly than Sam, who weaves from side to side like a drunkard. In the dining car, we eat ham sandwiches and drink tea with milk and sugar, gazing out at the rushing dark. For years I’ve dreamed of this moment—or rather, a moment like this. How different it is from my imaginings! My ankles are cold, my feet pinched in these new shoes, the air sour with tobacco smoke and body odor, the bread stale, the tea weak and bitter.
And yet—here I am, going somewhere new. How shockingly easy it was to pick up and go, to buy a ticket and board a train and head off into the unknown.
Portland, Portsmouth, Newburyport. We slow into stations one after another that never have meant more to me than words on a map. When we arrive in Salem, I think about our ancestor who lived here. I imagine Bridget Bishop standing on the scaffold, trying desperately to use the sentence against her to her own advantage. If you truly believe I’m a witch, she must have thought, then you must also believe I have the power to harm you. I’ve always assumed that John Hathorne trumped up those charges against rebels and misfits as a way of enforcing social codes. But now I wonder: What if he really did believe those women were capable of ensnaring his soul?
When we pull into South Station, it’s dark and cold and we must take three different trains to get to the Carles’—one of them elevated, which requires dragging our bags up and down stairs. With Sam’s arm under mine I concentrate on my steps, one foot up, the next one down. When I dreamed of a life with Walton, I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to navigate city living. Everything comes back to this body, this faulty carapace. How I wish I could crack it open and leave it behind.
DESPITE MY TREPIDATION about being in Boston, it’s exciting to be in a new place and easy enough to pretend that everything is all right—to chat amiably with Ramona as she fries eggs for breakfast, exclaim over her wedding gifts and the charming view of the cobblestoned street from the apartment window, play card games in the evenings at a square folding table in the living room with her and Harland and Sam. (Though I can’t help flinching when Harland suggests we play Old Maid.)
But just under the surface, my heart feels raw, painful to the touch. Beneath my smiles and nods and exclamations, I drift through each day like a ghost, silently keening for what might have been. Here, in Harvard Yard, Walton and I might have rested on a park bench. At Jordan Marsh Department Store we would have selected furniture and dishes. On the banks of the Charles we’d spread a quilt for a picnic and I’d lean back against his chest, watching the rowers go by. At night I fall into bed exhausted, overwhelmed by a grief so overwhelming that I can hardly breathe.
In spite of my best efforts, Ramona isn’t fooled. One morning she says, apropos of nothing, “It was brave of you to come.” The two of us are sitting at the breakfast nook eating soft-boiled eggs in china cups and toast propped in a silver rack. Sam and Harland have gone for a stroll.
“I’m happy to be here.”
She takes a sip of coffee. “I’m glad. It couldn’t have been an easy decision to make the trip.”
“No,” I admit. “But Sam insisted.”
“I know. He told me. But—you are having a nice time, aren’t you?”
I nod, buttering my toast. “Of course, a lovely time.”
“I want to tell you, Christina . . .” She sets down her spoon. “You must be wondering. Walton lives in Malden. He rarely comes into the city these days.”
I look in her eyes. “I was wondering.”
“I hope that sets your mind at ease.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“I told him. I felt I had to. In case . . .”
“It makes sense. You’re friends.” I can hear the bitter edge in my voice.
She bites her lip. “Family friends. From childhood. It’s hard to just cut people off . . . even though . . .” Shaking her head, she says, “I don’t know how to explain it. I feel like a traitor. I know how painful it was for you. He behaved abominably.”
Ramona seems so sincerely distressed that I feel a trickle of empathy for her. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”
“Do you?” she says hopefully.
“The past is past.”
I know it’s what she wants to hear. She smiles, clearly relieved. “I’m so glad you feel that way. I do too! And by the way, I know you said you aren’t interested, but Boston is filled with eligible bachelors.”
“Ramona—”
She flaps her hand. “Yes, yes, I know, you’ve hung up your rod. You can’t blame a girl for trying.”
A FEW DAYS later, Ramona says, “I can’t imagine it’s easy for you, Christina dear, all this perambulating around.”
She’s right. Every inch of Boston has been treacherous for me, from the cobblestoned streets to the crowded sidewalks. She and Sam and even bumbling Harland steer me into the elevator and down the steps, offering steady arms for our afternoon strolls. Even so, I trip and stumble. “I truly appreciate your help,” I tell her.
“Oh, well—it’s nothing. But it does seem, perhaps, that your situation is more acute than it used to be. I see you wincing sometimes. Are you in pain?”
I shrug. The pain has become part of me, just something I live with, like my pale eyelashes and skimmed-milk skin. But when I wake in the morning now, it takes several minutes of stretching and kneading before I can move my hands. And my feet often feel mired in glue; I can’t walk more than four or five steps on my own without losing my balance.
“Christina, Walton told me he had a conversation with you about this some time ago. He said he urged you to come to Boston to see if something could be done.”
I feel my face flush. “He didn’t have any business—”
She raises a finger. “This is not about Walton. I spoke with a doctor—a very good doctor—at Boston City Hospital, and he thinks they might be able to help. It wouldn’t be right away. Not this visit. We’d need to make an appointment. All I’m asking is for you to consider it. Look”—she sighs—“don’t you want to have a normal life, with normal opportunities? You refused before, and . . .”
Her unsaid words linger on the air. I know what she’s implying: that my unwillingness to consider treatment may have cost me the relationship. I feel a surge of anger. Yes—this was exactly what I feared at the time. That Walton’s feelings for me were conditional. That he was telling me to get better, or else.
But the anger subsides as quickly as it arose. It would be nice to have a normal life. I’m tired of pretending to be strong, of hiding the fact that even the smallest chores exhaust me. I’m tired of the bruises and scrapes and the pitying looks of people on the street. Maybe this doctor could actually help me. Who knows? Maybe he can even make me well.
“All right,” I tell Ramona. “I’ll consider it.”
She smiles. “Good! We just might get that leaky boat of yours patched up after all.”
NEWSPAPERS ARE FILLED with dispatches from the front. The Boston Globe reports that the United States is sending nearly ten thousand soldiers to France every day. In Cushing we heard occasional stories about boys who enlisted, or, after the Selective Service Act was passed last year, were drafted. (My farmer brothers, like many in our area, were exempt.) We listened to radio reports. But here the news is not an abstract event, happening far away. Walking across Harvard Yard, Sam and I come upon several thousand young men in blue regulation sailor suits, new recruits attending Radio School. Boston Common is lined with Red Cross tents, where volunteers collect and pack supplies to ship overseas.
When the s
uffragettes who’ve been picketing in front of the White House for more than two years are disparaged in opinion columns, Ramona and Eloise are incensed and talk about it at length. They know the names of some of the ladies, the arguments for why women should be given the vote. They talk about these events as if they have a stake in the outcome. As if they have a right—an obligation, even—to an opinion.
“But this has nothing to do with us,” I say.
“It has everything to do with us,” Ramona replies indignantly.
None of the tasks that fill my days in Cushing are relevant in Ramona’s world. It’s as if she’s playing house in her four-room apartment overlooking the street, four flights up, with no one to take care of but her well-meaning but slightly ham-fisted husband and plenty of money with which to do it. How different my life would be with electric lights and an indoor toilet, hot water that comes out of a faucet in the kitchen and the lavatory, gas burners on the stovetop that ignite with the flick of a match, cast-iron radiators that heat every room. If I weren’t spending all my time stoking the fire, maybe I, too, would know what’s going on in the wider world. Ramona attends the opera, the latest plays; she browses in the millinery store and the ladies’ shops. She has a girl (Ramona calls her that, though she’s older than us) who comes in twice a week to take the laundry, scrub the floors, change the bedding, dust the breakfront, and wash the dishes while Ramona sits at the table in her dressing gown reading the Boston Herald.
Ramona refuses to step outside without a hat and a dress in the latest style, freshly starched and ironed. I—who have two plain dresses, two skirts, two blouses, and two slightly crumpled hats to choose from—spend a lot of time waiting for her to get ready. “Oh, Christina, you must be exasperated,” she says with a sigh, hurrying out of her bedroom, pinning on one of her many hats in front of the hall mirror while I idle by the door. “All this folderol, primping and pin curls and hatpins—I expend so much energy worrying about how I look! You just are who you are. I envy that.”
A Piece of the World Page 15