“I’m perfect,” I say a little stiffly.
“I know you’re perfect. I was asking if you’re chilly.” He smiles, and I can tell he’s trying to lighten my mood.
I suck on the candy for a moment. “You’re leaving.”
“Not for a few days.”
“Soon.”
“Too soon,” he concedes, lacing his fingers through mine.
For a few minutes we walk along in silence. Then I venture, “Teachers are needed all over. Even in Maine.”
He squeezes my hand gently but says nothing. Above our heads a riot of birdsong erupts, piercing the quiet. We both look up. The dense tree cover, leaf lush, gives nothing away. Then, suddenly swooping across the road, a dark flurry.
“I’ve never seen so many crows,” he remarks.
“Actually, they’re blackbirds.”
“Ah. What would I do without you to correct me?” He pulls on my hand playfully, and then, realizing he’s yanking me off balance, tucks his arm around my waist. “Such a clever girl,” he murmurs in my ear. Then he slows and stops in the road.
I’m not sure what he’s doing. “What is it?”
He puts a finger to his lips and tugs me gently down the embankment into a copse of blue-black spruce. In the shadows he cups my warm face in his cool hands. “You are truly something, Christina.”
I look into his pale eyes, trying to decipher what he’s saying. He gazes back implacably. “I can’t tell if you’re sad to be leaving,” I say, a petulant tone creeping into my voice.
“Of course I am. But admit it—you’ll be a bit relieved. ‘Finally summer’s over, I have my life back.’”
I shake my head.
He shakes his head, mimicking me. “No?”
“No. I—”
He kisses me on the mouth, gathers me closer, kisses my bony shoulder, the hollow of my neck. He runs his hand down my bodice, hesitates for a moment, then continues all the way to the folds of my skirt. I am dizzy with surprise. He pushes me back against the bark of a tree. I feel its knots pressing into my back as he leans into me, running a hand down my side, another under my blouse, up the slight curve of my breast. His mouth on mine jams my head awkwardly against the trunk, an uncomfortable and yet not altogether unpleasant experience.
The butterscotch clicks in my mouth. “I’d better spit this out, or I might choke,” I say.
He laughs. “Me too.”
I don’t care that it’s unladylike; I spit it on the grass.
Now his hand is between my legs, lost in the fabric. I feel him cup me there in a proprietary way, and I push my hips toward him, feeling his hardness between us. My skin is alive, every nerve ending pulsing. His breathing ragged, insistent. This is what I want. This passion. This certainty. This clear sign of his desire. Right now I would do anything, anything he asks.
And then—a sound on the road. Walton jerks his head up, alert as a bird dog. “What is that?” he breathes.
I cock my head. Feel a low rumbling in my soles. “An automobile, I think.”
The sky is dark now. I can barely see his face.
He pulls back, then sways into me, clutching my shoulders. “Oh, Christina,” he murmurs. “You make me want you.”
The darkness emboldens me. “I’m yours.”
Still holding my shoulders, he rests his head on my breastbone like a nudging sheep. When he sighs, I feel his warm breath on my chest. “I know.” Then he looks up into my eyes with a startling intensity. “We must be together. Beyond”—he waves an arm, indicating the trees, the road, the sky—“all this.”
My heart leaps. “Oh, Walton. Do you mean it?”
“I do. I promise.”
Though everything in my nature fights against it, I’m determined to find out what he means. Swallowing hard, I ask, “What do you promise?”
“That we will be together. There are things I need to—resolve. You must come to Boston, and meet my parents. But I promise you, Christina, yes.”
Blue-black spruce shushing overhead, gravelly dirt under my thin-soled shoes, the smell of pine, a Necco wafer of moon in the sky. Some sense memories fade as soon as they’re past. Others are etched in your mind for the rest of your life. This, I already know, is one of those.
When we get to the Grange Hall, Ramona and Eloise are chatting and dancing with whatever stray boys they can round up, gaily pulling them out of chairs. The makeshift band, fiddle and piano and standing bass, is composed of some of the boys I grew up with, Billy Grover and Michael Verzaleno and Walter Brown. They play raucous, sloppy versions of “The Maple Leaf Rag” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Walton croons in my ear: “Leave the Strand and Piccadilly, or you’ll be to blame, for love has fairly drove me silly—hoping you’re the same!”
When they start to play “Danny Boy,” I listen to the words as if I’ve never heard them before, as if they were written just for me.
The summer’s gone, and all the roses dying,
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide . . .
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow—
Oh, Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so
We dance nose to nose, Walton’s hand low on my waist, a tacit reminder of our moment in the woods. “I’ll miss this,” he says. “I’ll miss you.”
My voice chokes in my throat. I don’t trust myself to speak.
After the last song, we make our way home on the dark road with the others. My legs are tired, but melancholy makes me even slower, like a dog on a leash being pulled where it doesn’t want to go. Walton puts his arm around me and we fall back, away from the others. At the turnoff for the Carles’ we linger by the gate. I lean my head on his shoulder.
“I wish I could reach up and grab a faraway star and put it on your finger,” Walton says. Running a finger over my lips, he bends down to kiss me. I feel in his kiss the weight of his promise.
TEN DAYS LATER I receive a letter postmarked Massachusetts. “Remember a week ago tonight? I shall remember it until I see you again,” he writes. “What promises I make, I keep.”
DECEMBER IS AS gray as my mood. I haven’t received a letter from Walton since September.
Though it’s cold, there’s little snow. A cat has been hiding under the house, a butterscotch tiger-striped Maine coon with enormous ginger eyes. I tempt it out with a bowl of milk. Shivering, it laps the milk hungrily, and when the bowl is empty, I lift it onto my lap. A female. Her skin is loose around her bones; it’s like cradling a bag of hollow pipes. She licks my chin with a sea-urchin tongue and settles on my lap with a purr. I name her Lolly. She’s the only bright spot of my entire month.
For Christmas I give my brothers plaid shirts I’ve sewn out of flannel while they were working outside. Mother knits socks and hats. Papa makes no pretense of giving presents; he says the roof over our heads is present enough. Sam gives me a baking tray, Fred puts a ribbon on a new straw broom, Al carves a set of wooden spoons. Walton sends a thick cream-colored card foil-stamped with a green wreath and a red bow, addressed to The Olson Family. “Sending you warm wishes in this cold season. Happy Christmas and God Bless!” He signs it “Walton Hall.”
Instead of displaying his card, as I’ve done in past years, I take it upstairs to my room. I take the stack of his letters from the shelf where I keep them, untie the pale pink ribbon, and sit on my bed, opening the letters and reading each one. All roads lead back to Cushing for me. What promises I make, I keep. With love. I hold the Christmas card between my hands so tightly that it rips a little. Slowly, I tear it down the middle, then rip the pieces again and again until they’re as small as butterscotch candies, as two-cent stamps, as faraway stars in the sky.
I WRITE TO Walton after the holidays, wishing him a happy 1917, telling him about the presents I received from my brothers and the flannel shirts I sewed. I describe the suckling pig we roasted in a pit Al built in the yard, the blueberry compote and fried apple cake, the chicken stew with squash dumplings and the drink Sam conc
octs on New Year’s Eve: rum, molasses, and cloves in a mug with boiling water, blended with a cinnamon stick. Whaler’s Toddy, it’s called. I strive to convey the flavor of our humble rituals, the camaraderie and clamor of a house filled with boys, a feeling of well-being and holiday cheer that isn’t so much exaggerated in the telling as enhanced. I do my best to avoid a plaintive undertow.
I don’t understand. Why haven’t you written?
Days pass, weeks. Months. I thought I was used to waiting. This is a new kind of hell. My soul feels coated with tar.
I berate myself for the letter I sent, filled with mindless chatter about our simple rituals. What I have to share is paltry, insignificant, domestic. And yet it’s all I have to give.
As winter turns to spring I slog to the post office, zigzagging through the snow and slush. Bills, flyers, the Saturday Evening Post. “Nothing for you today, Christina,” Bertha Dorset says, her prim voice threaded with pity. I want to lunge across the counter and throttle her until her face purples and she gasps for breath. But I take the mail and smile.
Even when the snow melts and the crocuses bloom I am cold, always cold, no matter how many blankets I pile on my bed. In the middle of the night, I listen to the wind screaming through gaps in the wall. I remember a story I read once about a woman who goes mad trapped inside her house and comes to believe that she lives behind the wallpaper. I am beginning to wonder if I will stay in this house forever, creeping up and down the stairs like the woman in that story.
IT IS A warm morning in May when I see Ramona out the kitchen window, striding toward the house across the grass, head down, shoulders squared. I’ve thought about this day all winter. I sink into my old chair beside the red geraniums. Lolly springs onto my lap and I stroke her back. Ordinarily I would get up, put a kettle on for tea, stand in the doorway to welcome her, but I can’t rally the energy to cover the conversation that I know is coming with the rituals of a friendly visit.
Ramona isn’t surprised to find me in the kitchen. “Hello, Christina. Mind if I come in?” Her smile is wobbly. Stepping across the threshold into the gloom, she squints. “So good to see you.”
I muster a smile in response. “You too.”
“Did I catch you in the middle of something?”
“Just the usual.”
“You look well.”
I know I don’t. I’m wearing an old apron over a plain checked dress. “I wasn’t expecting company.” I start to untie the back of the apron.
“Oh, please don’t change,” she says, adding quickly, “It’s just me.”
“I’m done with the lunch dishes. About to take it off anyway.”
She watches me wrestle with the tie in the back. I can tell she wants to help but knows I wouldn’t like it.
For a moment she hesitates in the middle of the floor. She’s clutching a paper bag and wearing a style of dress I haven’t seen before, yellow and white checkerboard patterned with full white sleeves and three tortoiseshell buttons, a drapey white collar, and a wide waistband. Pale stockings and white leather shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a bun with a yellow ribbon.
“That’s a nice dress,” I say, though her outfit makes me think she must be stopping through on her way to somewhere more exciting.
“Oh, thank you. It’s summery, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
As if suddenly remembering, she says, “I brought you something! Mama had a crate sent from Florida.” She takes three large oranges out of her bag and sets them on the table. “I’d love to get down to Florida one of these days. I can just see myself lying on a beach on a towel with a big straw hat. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Maybe so.”
“How about we go together? In the winter sometime, when it’s so dang cold.”
I shrug. “I’m not keen on burning in the sun.”
“I forget about your Swedish skin,” she says. “Why don’t I peel us an orange and I can dream about Florida and you enjoy a healthy treat?”
“Well, I just ate lunch . . .” I begin, then relent. “All right.”
She digs into an orange with her thumbs and peels back the thick cratered crust, carefully picks off the white veins. Pulling it apart, she hands me a slice. “Cheers!”
The orange is so sweet, so juicy, that I almost forget how nervous I am.
When we’ve polished it off, Ramona pulls Al’s rocker toward the table and sits down. “I love this old rocker,” she says. “So lived in.” She rubs the arms where the black paint has worn through to wood.
It’s only now, with her hands draped over the arms of the rocker, that I notice a sparkle on her finger—a ring. “My goodness, is that—?”
She blushes deeply, then leans forward and thrusts her splayed fingers toward me. “Yes! Can you believe it? Engaged. I wondered when you’d notice.” The false cheer in her voice is evidence of how awkward this is for both of us. “I would’ve written to let you know, but it happened only a few weeks ago.”
The ring, with a sizable central diamond encircled by a pattern of tiny diamond chips, is more ornate than any I’ve ever seen. I tell her honestly, “It’s beautiful. From Harland, I assume?”
She laughs. “Of course Harland. It got quite serious quite suddenly. We plan to marry in the fall, just a small family wedding. There’s lots to do, goodness! But I’m so glad to be back here now. And to see you.”
“Well.” I think of portly Harland in his funny short-brimmed hat. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. It means the world to have your blessing.” Spying Lolly sidling through the doorway, she cries, “Oh, what a pretty cat! So big.”
“She’s a Maine coon. They’re little tigers.”
“Here, kitty.” She clucks her tongue and snaps her fingers.
Lolly freezes, looks back and forth between us.
“She won’t come,” I say. “She’s stubborn and shy. Like me.” As if to demonstrate, the cat streaks across the floor and leaps onto my lap.
Ramona smiles. “You’re not shy. You just like who you like. That cat’s the same way.”
Lolly arches into my hand, insisting that I stroke her, and for a few moments her steady purring is the only sound in the room.
A faint citrus scent lingers in the air.
Finally Ramona sighs. “I have been fretting about how to bring this up. Walton . . . I don’t . . .” She shakes her head, twists one of the large buttons on her dress. “He’s a dear, I adore him, but he can be so exasperating.”
I can’t follow what she’s saying. Walton is a dear? She adores him? “He stopped writing,” I say.
“I know, he told me.”
I grip Lolly’s back so hard that she meows and sinks a claw into my palm, then squirms out of my lap. A bead of blood springs to the surface of my hand. I wipe it on my skirt, leaving a pink smear.
“It was abominable of him. I kept telling him so. And—well—cruel.”
Though I knew this moment was coming, not a single fiber of my being wants to be having this conversation. “Ramona—”
“Let me bumble through this, horrible as it is—I have to. Walton loves you—loved you, I suppose. Oh, Christina.” She sighs. “Every word out of my mouth is as painful for me to say as it must be for you to hear, and I don’t want to do this, but . . .” She stops. Then blurts: “Walton is engaged to be married.”
Walton is. Engaged. To be. Married. Am I missing something? Engaged to be married to me? I look at her blankly.
Walton is engaged to be married.
To someone else.
In all the ways I’ve thought about his silence, considered its sources, this possibility never occurred to me. But why not? It makes the most logical sense. He stopped writing abruptly. Of course—of course—he met someone else.
I feel as if I am emptied out, filled with thick, heavy air. I can’t think or see; it fills me to my eyes. I try to remember what Walton looks like. A straw boater with a black grosgrain ribbon. A linen jacket. Soft girlish h
ands. But I can’t envision his face.
“Christina? Are you all right?” Ramona’s face is stretched into a ghastly expression. I look into her eyes. It’s as if I’m watching her through a scrim.
“Why.” A tiny word, one syllable, not even a question.
She sighs. “I’ve asked myself a million times, and Walton too; I’ve begged him for an answer that makes sense. I don’t even know if he knows, except . . .” Her voice trails off.
“Except . . .”
“Except.” She twists in her chair. “The distance. And his parents.”
“His parents.”
“He told you, he said. That they—disapproved.”
“He didn’t say that.”
“He didn’t?”
Leaning back in the chair, I close my eyes. Maybe he did.
“His mother is an awful woman. A striver. She wanted—wants—a certain kind of life for her golden boy. And she kept bringing around the daughter of a friend, a girl at Smith, and I just think after a while he thought, what’s the use, I can’t fight it anymore; the easiest thing is to give in.”
“The easiest thing,” I echo.
“I suppose she’s not a bad sort, really. She’s all right.” Ramona shrugs. “Though of course I never said that to him; I only told him how vexed I was, how disappointed. On your behalf.”
By the way she’s telling me this I can see that she has spent time with this woman, that they have all been out together. “What is her name.”
“Marilyn. Marilyn Wales.”
I contemplate this for a moment. A real person, with a name. “He never even . . . wrote to explain.”
“I know. It makes me so angry. We argued about it. I told him it was unconscionably rude. He said he couldn’t do it; he begged me to write to you myself, to tell you, and honestly I refused.”
I feel as if I’m being whipped, every word a lash. “You knew I was waiting,” I say slowly, my voice rising, “and you wouldn’t put me out of my misery?”
“Christina?” Mother calls from upstairs. “Everything all right?”