The other girl, Mary Abbott, went back to London alone and Beth stayed with me in my loft in the Rue du Bac. Sous les toits de Paris, and all very romantic and my bed was a lot warmer than it had been in some time. We saw the spring in, and spent a fortune keeping the rooms filled with lilacs, which she loved, and in June I bought a secondhand car, packed up my paints, and we worked our way down to the South of France, into Italy. We lingered for days in the Uffizi in Florence; then went on to Venice, and finally to Greece.
We spent that winter in North Africa, where a steady stream of letters arrived for Beth, addressed in a firm, authoritative hand. Reverend Colby, Beth’s father, was demanding that she return home. Hers was an unusual situation, and though she was not inclined to talk about it I gradually learned enough to put the puzzling pieces of her life into some sort of order.
She had been christened Bethany, after the town in Connecticut her mother had come from. Mrs. Colby had been rich, and her money enabled the Reverend to enjoy a style of living not permitted to most men of the cloth. Their house, in a suburb of a large New England city, was expensively furnished, but although Lawson Colby liked his creature comforts, he mentally donned a hair shirt, forcing his wife into a strict and regimented observance of Protestant virtues. Mrs. Colby had died of diphtheria when Beth was only two, and from then on Beth lived under the bitter and tyrannical eye of her father, who forced church at her on all occasions. What he raised was not a God-fearing child, but a God-despairing one.
After college, Beth had persuaded him to let her come to Europe with Mary Abbott, to “visit cathedrals,” but now the year was up and he demanded that she return home. I had decided I was going to marry her, and had notions of what sort of reception this would meet with at the Reverend’s Methodist hands. Bethany Colby marrying the son of an immigrant Greek from Jersey City—Catholic Greeks, at that. Raised in a happy home, I could appreciate Beth’s basic needs. Being motherless, she felt rootless. She was not religious, she did not love her father. She had never experienced any warm stream of affection as a child, and after her mother’s death the father had become a stricter parent—harsh even—making sure that the minister’s daughter didn’t go wild. In the Puritan ethic of his Cotton Matherish forebears, to be happy was, by extension, to be sinful, and until we met I do not think Beth had ever been very happy. But there was this about her: she had the characteristics of the chameleon, which takes hue and color from its surroundings; stubborn though she might be at times, Beth was open to influence. I was a happy person, and by some subtle transference she, too, became happy. With me the minister’s daughter went wild on the Left Bank and all the Reverend’s decrees about Thrift, Work, Virtue, and the True God were tossed out the windows of our Paris loft.
It was impossible to toss the father as well, so we went home and faced the music, which at best proved discordant. The Reverend had heard tales of bohemian artists living in garrets; he did not deem me a suitable choice for a son-in-law. But by spring Beth’s defiance of the old man was sufficient to elicit his agreement to our marriage if I would “settle down to some honest work.”
We were married in June and moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I put the paintbrushes away, and found a job with Osborne & Associates. The brushes stayed put away for fifteen years.
Shortly after Kate was born, we took a larger apartment on the West Side, around the corner from Pepe’s Chili Palor. Since Mrs. Pepe often baby-sat for us, we would return the favor, and it was while sitting for their daughter that I contracted the painful case of mumps that ’Cita was still apologizing for.
I swelled up, Beth nursed me, I deflated; and went back to Osborne & Associates, hating every day of it. But during those years Beth and I were happy together. I knew that partly she had married me in order to be free of Reverend Colby, and in many ways she had replaced him with me. Now, if she had no mother, she at least had two fathers. As Kate grew, Beth lavished on the child all the attention she herself had lacked. I could see what was happening from the beginning, that Kate was being smothered with a maternal blanket of the heaviest weave. When she was nine, she had her first asthmatic attack.
These began in the winter of our ninth year of marriage, when something happened to Beth, a breakdown whose origins were both deep-seated and obscure. She withdrew into another world. I thought at first she must be having an affair with some other man, but I was wrong. She came home one evening and announced that she wanted a divorce. She was going to leave and take Kate with her. No amount of reasoning on my part could sway her from this stubborn course, but a friend of ours at Columbia persuaded her to see a psychiatrist. The cause of her morbidity became quickly apparent, and I met with the doctor to learn what he had discovered. Beth had lacked a mother, which had led to a hatred of the father. I had replaced the father, and now her subconscious was transferring the hatred to me.
We got through it. She became whole again, became the Beth I had known, and we even joked about her having the nine-year itch. But there was still the problem of Kate’s attacks, which no amount of medical treatment was able to help, which nothing had helped until we had come to Cornwall Coombe and the Widow Fortune.
I felt the keel of the boat strike something, and I opened my eyes. Beth was smiling at me. “We’ve run aground, darling.”
The boat had nosed onto a sandy shoal, and I lifted an oar from the lock to push off. “No. Let’s stay here a little,” she suggested. I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my trouser cuffs, and got out to pull the boat onto the shoal. I helped her ashore and we clambered onto the bank, where we spread the blanket and lay down.
The river formed a small cove, a secluded inlet screened by shadblow bushes and overhung with willow branches. It was the perfect spot, a country idyll all its own. We had left the radio in the boat and the music came as though from far away. I felt a pastoral serenity and peace that communicated itself to me through the lazy drone of the bees working the patches of meadow flowers close by, the sunlight trembling on the pool below and flickering in the leaves overhead.
In the distance, I heard the sound of gunshots, and I realized we were very likely trespassing in Old Man Soakes’s preserves. One of the boys was probably after squirrels in the woods. There were several more shots; then the air became still once more. We took off our clothes and slid down the clay bank into the water and swam, then lay on the shoal to dry ourselves off. Back on the bank, I moved the blanket even farther under cover, and we made love in God’s great outdoors.
“What do you talk about when you and the ladies get together?”
“Oh, you know—girl talk.”
“Mrs. Brucie and Mrs. Green are hardly girls.” We had put our clothes on again, and were lying together on the blanket, I with my head back against a fallen log. Beth said, “Mostly we’re talking about selling their quilts.”
“Selling them?”
“Mm-hm. Remember Mary Abbott from Bennington? She’s got that shop on Lexington, and I know if she put a couple in her window they’d sell in no time. I’m going to talk to her about it. And there’s all that carved bone jewelry, and the dolls. There’s a good market for that kind of handicraft work today. Look at the way they sell things from down in Appalachia.”
I agreed it sounded like a good idea. “What else do you talk about?”
“Men.”
“Come on.”
“Don’t you find the Widow fascinating?”
“Mm-hm.”
“The things she knows. I don’t mean just cooking and sewing, but all that herbal business and her cures.” She was playing with the little red bag hung around my neck. “It’s really working, huh? Let me see.” She inspected my wart, then kissed my finger.
I leaned to brush a leaf that had fallen on her shoulder. As I pulled away again, she stopped me with her hand.
“Ned?”
“Mm?”
A look came over her face, one I did not immediately understand. “Would you like to have another child?”
“Us? We can’t—”
She nodded eagerly. “The Widow says we might be able to. She’s got a remedy. Wouldn’t you like it—a baby brother for Kate?”
“Hey—wait a minute. Not so fast. What kind of remedy?”
“I don’t know. One of these elixirs she makes. She says that often it works. Mrs. Thomas has wanted a baby for the longest time, and she couldn’t have one until the Widow had her and Mr. Thomas taking something. Now she’s pregnant.”
“Aren’t we sort of old to start the nursery business all over again—even if the Widow’s elixir worked?”
“We’re not exactly ready for Sun City. I’m not about to go through the change of life. Kate will be married in no time—darling, she will. And—”
“What?”
“I’d like to be a mother again. Once more, while there’s still time. Oh Ned, I want it. Your child. A son.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I had put the idea out of my mind for so long that it felt like a completely new one. And what if the Widow failed? What if Beth’s hopes were raised and we couldn’t produce? And whose fault would it be? Beth with her obstetrical problems or me with my mumps? I suggested tests; let a medical man determine the case before—
No, she said. Stubborn Beth. No doctor—the Widow.
“Well,” I said. “Well.” I grinned, then kissed her, a tacit submission to her wishes. I guessed the spare room could become a nursery, if between us we could provide an occupant. I kissed her again, and decided we had had the perfect afternoon. When we spoke of it later, it became That Day, one I’ve relived many times since; and I sometimes wonder if she has too.
I decided to go that evening to Saxony and talk to Mrs. O’Byrne about the slates for the studio roof. A siroccolike breeze had come up when I left Beth and drove out along the Old Sallow Road, and the sun was dropping behind the cornfields on my left as I headed toward the Lost Whistle Bridge. Coming over the rise, I looked down on the panorama of the Tatum farm, its barn and sheds already becoming dark shapes on the hill. Across the road lay the edge of Soakes’s Lonesome, with the river winding along its farther side.
Passing the Tatum house, I noticed that the fire under Irene’s soap kettle was cold. Figures were moving in the front parlor where the lighted windows cast their shadows on the porch. In the drive were several vehicles, and the Widow’s little mare stood between the buggy shafts. Silently wishing the ladies a pleasant evening of quilting, I continued along past the woods. When I passed the next bend, I saw the peddler, Jack Stump, on his rig. I tooted the horn as I went by, and he waved. Glancing in the mirror, I saw him trundle the cart over the gully and pull it up among the trees.
I could feel the wind buffeting my car as I drove onto the covered bridge. There were still figures hunched over some work on the Soakeses’ jetty, where the skiff was again tied up. Curious to see what they were doing, I stopped halfway across, took the binoculars from the glove compartment, and got out to look through the latticework that trussed the bridge.
Leaning on the railing between the cross-trussings, I adjusted my lenses and brought the group into close view. I recognized Old Man Soakes himself, and the boys I had fought with that morning. There were ducks in the water, and I realized they were not live ducks at all but decoys, attached to strings. It was the manufacture of these fake birds that the Soakeses were engaged in, the father cutting canvas sections from a pattern, one of the boys sewing them together, another stuffing them with some sort of material. The one sewing was using a sailmaker’s curved needle to stitch up the seam along the back.
Twenty minutes later I was in Saxony, and I stopped at a drugstore and looked up the name O’Byrne. The drug clerk gave me directions and I located the house a short distance away.
Mrs. O’Byrne was amiable and friendly, and readily disposed to sell me the slates, which were piled out behind the garage. With the wind whipping her skirts, she took me out to view the slates, and she showed me where the breezeway had collapsed between the house and the “summer kitchen,” as she called the large shed that had once been connected to the main structure.
“I figured when that rooftree came down, there wasn’t any point in rebuildin’.” Besides, she said, she was alone, and couldn’t afford any household repairs. I decided the price of slates had just gone up. But they were the proper size and color, each drilled with holes for nailing, so I bought forty of them. When I had loaded them in the car trunk, I wrote out a check for the figure she asked.
Was I, she wondered, interested in old clocks? She had a particularly fine one which she would like to sell, a genuine signed Tiffany. I said I might be interested, and she took me into the house to show it to me.
The clock was a beauty, black onyx and ormolu, with works that made a pleasant ticking sound, and a delicate chime. I offered her a hundred and twenty-five dollars and she took it.
While I wrote out a second check, Mrs. O’Byrne quizzed me about life in Cornwall Coombe: how long had we lived there; did we raise corn; was our daughter in school there; did I know an old lady over there somewheres who birthed babies—she must be passed away by now. No, I said, the Widow Fortune was very much alive. Well, Mrs. O’Byrne said, she was competition for Dr. Bonfils, who lived here in Saxony. Yes, the doctor had treated our Kate several times.
Then: “Have you come across someone named Gracie Everdeen?”
Yes; in a way, I said. Did Mrs. O’Byrne know her?
“Indeed I did. She stayed with me most of one whole summer back some years ago.” She spoke with interest of the girl, whom she immediately dubbed “that poor unfortunate creature.”
“She was the most melancholy thing I ever saw. She just appeared one day, right there at the door. I was canning cherries, so it must have been late June. Usually I’m able to can all season as the various things come along, but just about that time I’d boiled up a mess of corned beef. I was carrying the kettle out to dump the water between the bricks when I slipped and scalded my foot. That would have put an end to my canning that year, except here came Grace Everdeen looking for work. I told her I couldn’t pay much, but she could have board, and sleep in the little attic room. That was fine with her, she said.
“So she moved her few things up to the attic and looked after the house pretty well till I could get back on my feet again. She canned the quinces when they came in, and the tomatoes, and all. She was a good worker and a neat one but, as I say, melancholy.”
Mrs. O’Byrne shook her head. The wind had caught a shutter and was rapping it against the clapboards; she asked me to oblige her by securing it. When I had done so, she continued her story.
“She’d been in some trouble, and she’d run off. I took it she’d done a deal of travelin’ and was gone most of two years. But now she’d come back. She had a sweetheart over in the Coombe and she wanted him, though how she expected she might have him, looking as she did, I’ll never know. In any case, there was another woman.”
Who, I asked, might that have been? Mrs. O’Byrne did not know. “But she cursed the pair of them, and I could hear her up in the attic crying to break your heart. Then she wrote him a letter, which she asked me to check for spelling, demanding he come and meet her. I stamped and mailed the letter for her, and by well into July—we were canning peaches, I remember—there still wa’n’t any answer. Then one day it come. That evenin’ she went to meet him. What happened then I got from Mrs. Lake.”
“Mrs. Lake?”
“Old Mrs. Lake that lived by the bridge. She’s dead nine years at Easter, and the house was pulled down. In any case. She lived close by the Lost Whistle, as they call it ’cross river. Mrs. Lake heard and saw, and when she came to visit me, if I didn’t see, I heard.”
Mrs. O’Byrne having heard from Mrs. Lake, now I was to hear from Mrs. O’Byrne. Roger Penrose had ridden out on his horse to the bridge, where Grace was waiting for him on the other side, but neither of them, for unknown reasons, would cross to meet the other. Roger begged G
race to return over the river, while she demanded he come to her. But the meeting was a stalemate; Roger rode away without Gracie.
They continued to rendezvous through the summer, always in the evening and always with the same result. Thwarted, Roger became angrier and angrier with Grace, while she, standing at the bridge portal, shouted wild and passionate pleas through cupped hands. It was to no avail; still the lovers did not see each other.
“Mrs. Lake said their voices echoed somethin’ fierce through the bridge, and the pain of them two was somethin’ terrible to hear, like wounded animals. In any case, raspberries came and went, and then we was into blueberries and damson plums, and by this time I was off my crutches, so I did up the gooseberries and currants from the fields, and that must have been September, for that’s when gooseberries is ripe. One evening I decided to walk down to the bridge and have a look for myself. I left before Grace had redded up the dishes, and Mrs. Lake and I hid on her porch, with the light off, and here comes Gracie, with a scarf wrapped around her head, standing this side, while there he came ahorseback—I could hear the hoofs as he rode along the road, then cloppin’ up on the approach. Then he stops and calls: ‘Grace, come home!’
“Finally, he must have gotten mad beyond reason, for now over he came at a gallop. Grace tried to run, but he pulled alongside o’ her and scooped her up right out o’ the roadway and carried her back across the bridge.”
“Back to Cornwall?”
She sniffed. “Not likely. They went off onto the side of the road, but they was just there on the other side, for we could hear the horse whinnying in the orchard. ‘Well,’ I said to Mrs. Lake, ‘if it come to country matters, I must give Grace her notice in the morning.’