The boy smirked and grabbed Miriam’s hand, lacing their fingers together. Dorothy itched to yank them apart. Insolent students infuriated her. Maybe it was just as well she’d never been a parent; at least she could leave the students and go home at night.
“It’s time the two of you were heading back. We’ll walk with you,” said Grayson.
No one spoke as they tramped in double file, older couple behind the younger one, through the woods. They arrived at the rail fence where the school property began.
“Come have a bite with us, Miriam,” said Dorothy. She’d rescue her from the predatory boy.
“Thanks, but I’ll just go on back to the dining hall.”
“I’ll call the dorm, excuse you from lunch.” The invitation had become an order.
“See you,” said the boy, climbing over the fence instead of opening the gate.
The couple, Miriam in tow, crossed the road. The sign beside their mailbox read Grayson Shaw, Cabinetmaker and Luthier.
“What’s a luthier?” asked the girl.
“Maker of stringed instruments,” said Dorothy.
Grayson had been a woodworker before he started the school. Former customers still called, but there was no time for cabinetry. “Running a school is like running with a wild woman,” he sometimes joked. He found time for his dulcimers only late in the day or at night. It was as necessary as breathing for him to be doing something with his hands.
Clear Spring’s original music teacher, a young woman from South Carolina, had introduced the school to the lap dulcimer and inspired Grayson to try making one. “Can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” he said but attacked the project with enthusiasm and an engineer’s precision. He gave that first instrument to the teacher and she praised his gift for finding the voice in wood.
One morning Dorothy discovered an anonymous note in her mailbox in the faculty room. Keep an eye on your husband the music lover. She’d started to tear it up, but then tucked it beneath the blotter on her desk. At the end of the day, she passed it to Grayson across the supper table.
He read, rubbing his crew-cut hair. “Oh, for pity’s sake. It’s dulcimers I’m interested in, not that skinny little teacher.”
Dorothy had looked around at faculty meetings. Who wrote the note? The music teacher left after just one year. Whatever else was true about what had happened, it was lonely at the school for a single woman.
The summer after, Dorothy and Grayson went dancing every weekend at the amusement park in Glen Echo. The prescribed steps, the physical closeness, eased the lingering wariness she’d felt. On the drive home she would rest her hand in Grayson’s lap and sometimes they would end the evening making love. They won the waltz competition at the end of the summer, dancing with a sheet of paper pressed between them, paper pressed thin as the remaining shadow of her doubt. Grayson installed a wall of mirrors in his workshop, making it their private dance hall. They didn’t use it now; after dinner most evenings there were meetings, student emergencies, paperwork, bills. But he still played the dance records when he worked on his dulcimers. Yesterday evening she’d come to the workshop to say good night and found him listening to a waltz as he stroked tung oil on the dulcimer with his softest brush (special ordered, made from the ear hair of Asian oxen). She’d thought for a moment of inviting him to dance, but it was too late, and it had been so long since they had been partners in that way. Grayson was right; the school was ravenous and absorbing. Not like a wild woman, but a demanding tribe of needy children. It was funny, that their shared work sometimes drew them together and other times pushed them apart. Perhaps parenting would have been like that, too.
“Show Miriam the dulcimer,” Dorothy said now.
The workshop was fragrant with sawdust and varnish, Grayson’s scents. Almost finished, the instrument lay gleaming on the bench. He used black walnut for the backs of his dulcimers, and spruce or red cedar for the tops, taking care to pair the slices of wood in book-matched sets, twin grains side by side, like open pages of a book. On this one, the top was red cedar. She thought spruce was prettier, but Grayson preferred the sound with cedar. Rich as chocolate, he said.
“The way it shines, it makes you want to touch it,” said Miriam.
“Go ahead. It’s the ruby shellac,” he said. “Like rouge on a face.”
Miriam traced the heart-shaped sound hole. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
“Let me show you what’s inside.” He always inscribed a fragment of verse in each instrument, beneath the sound hole. The poem had to be brief, the letters tiny, to fit. “You can read it if the light shines in just right,” he said, holding the dulcimer up. “Can you make it out?”
The girl and the man stood side by side.
“The little rift within the lute by and by will make the music mute,” the girl read.
Tennyson. Was he alluding to the intervals of distance between them? There was an intermittent, insidious fissure, a rip that had first opened years ago, after the failed pregnancy. For a long time afterward, making love seemed a dangerous obligation, freighted with the longing and the fear of conceiving again, which never happened. Eventually, she’d come to terms with being barren, her regret mitigated by taking care of him, and then of students. She’d comforted herself with the realization that there was at least sometimes a special closeness possible for childless couples.
The music teacher had ripped open the seam between them again. Though the ambiguous incident became woven into the warp and woof of the years, it left a flaw in the fabric. Recently, it had been his turn to be angry when she insisted that he stay on at the school. But over any long marriage, there were bound to be periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium, seasons of warm and cold.
“Why’s it called a dulcimer?” asked Miriam.
“Latin,” said Dorothy. “Dulce means sweet. Like the sound it makes. There’s one in the house you can try. Please come help me with lunch.”
“Give a shout when you’re ready,” said Grayson.
Autumn sunlight reflected off the kitchen’s heart of pine floors. She kept the windows bare to see the trees in the orchard. But now the school had put the valuable land up for sale; it would be bulldozed for a housing development. She’d made her last batch of applesauce and stored it on the shelves Grayson had built for her in the cellar.
“You can set the table,” said Dorothy. “Silverware is in the drawer of the sideboard in the dining room.”
She telephoned the dorm advisor, one of their best young faculty, one they might lose next year to the higher salary of public school. “Miriam’s having lunch with us,” she explained. She arranged cold fried chicken from the evening before on a Blue Willow platter and poured applesauce into a pressed glass bowl.
“Which dishes should I use?” asked Miriam.
“The ones with the yellow flowers.” The dishes had been part of her trousseau. Use pretty things or you’re in bondage to them, her mother had said.
Miriam had seconds of everything: applesauce, devilled eggs, chicken. “Thanks, this was delicious.”
“Thee must join us again,” Grayson said.
Dorothy was startled. He rarely used the old Quaker form of address, except sometimes with her. It did feel right, having Miriam there. Without her, Dorothy might have criticized what he’d said in Meeting, accused him of further endangering the school. They would have quarreled. What if Miriam were to come live with them? It would reduce the cost of her scholarship to the school, and the girl would be safer here. They’d be safer, too.
“Lend me a dishtowel,” said Grayson after lunch. Linen was best for rubbing in the final coat of carnauba wax.