“Am I to be flattered?” Mary asks.
Edwin raises a hand and lowers it. He smiles nervously, a silent apology for the gaze with which his wife affixes Samuel, for the awkwardness that has swooped down from the rafters, as if from nowhere. Go no further, Mary’s eyes say. She is a hawk, surveying the field, arresting time as wings hold gravity at bay. The discomfort of this moment goes on and on, a silence hovering, beating its wings over the brothers and Alice, beating, beating, thudding from each a quietly rising alert.
“Scattering?” Mary draws out the sounds, as if each syllable is so worthy of disdain that the uttering of the word entire is an affront beyond the reach of the most liberal imagination. “Exactly what do you propose by that?”
“Come, now. You and I—we’re not like Edwin. It’s hard for us to stick to one thing. Admit—you’ve said it yourself—when you look back at your gardening notebooks, some seasons it appears that every crop has died. Did your garden truly fail? Never. Nature keeps busy even as we lapse. You just stopped writing. Perhaps an interesting houseguest arrived.” Samuel raises a hand and brow both to that possibility, and fixes Mary with a stare as intent as her own. “Or some other project. You start; you stop. Your concentration leaves. But when everything converges, ah—”
“Leave it, Samuel,” Edwin says.
And now it is Edwin’s warning that Alice does not like. In Samuel’s family, she has no place. She forces a smile again, at her own table a foreigner, ever congenial in recompense for not understanding a single word.
“What? She’s said it herself, Eddie. I meant no harm. I love her enthusiasms. Don’t misunderstand. The Anti-Imperialist League. The notebooks. The library lecture series—I wouldn’t have her any other way.”
“Not any way,” mouths Edwin.
“Are you suggesting”—Mary raises her voice—“that you and I scatter our seeds too widely?”
With that, Samuel stops in midrise and sits back down, his eyes on her. Then he turns deliberately toward Alice, who relaxes a bit to have him back, except that she fears her chest is flushed. She cannot look down to check because she does not wish to look away from him; she takes care not to blink, hoping her own unbroken gaze can pull him from his brother and sister-in-law. I am the one who loves you, she wills him to see. Though perhaps it had been foolish of her to wear such a dress. Next to the sober Mary, she feels silly. But then, she has neither manufactured nor lost a child.
“This sister of mine—I may call you that, Mary?”—Samuel pauses barely long enough for Mary to wave her hand in agreement or dismissal, it matters not what she thinks, he will not stop now—“has long charmed everyone on both sides of the river. The Deerfield, that is, not the Mississippi, though I dare say if she’d traveled West, she’d have had her share of admirers there, too.”
“Samuel, hush.”
She doesn’t mean hush at all, Alice thinks. She means say more, but discreetly. No need to drag the West into it. Keep the references local and polite.
“It’s true. This brother of mine plucked himself quite a woman.”
“Speaking of which,” says Edwin, “we haven’t properly congratulated you. The both of you.”
“Well, well. Are you ready now for me to stand with my bride for your blessing?”
“Samuel, you know I’m not much for ceremony.”
“I do know.”
“Forgive me that, Alice. We would have liked to come—but the weather was so bad, and—” Edwin’s voice falters as he searches his memory for what had two years earlier made the trip they had now completed appear impossible. The hard frost that May, the portraits to be finished. “We can see how happy you are together. How lucky for you both. Please—accept our congratulations.”
Alaska. He had meant then to go to Alaska. He had been selling off his stock of frames, his picture cart. That was it.
Alice inclines her head, a flush of gratitude creeping over her. He is kind, this brother. She finds her eyes wet. Is it kindness that makes her cry? Kindness a pocket she wishes to huddle inside, burying her face, hibernating all the long winter. But she is the hostess; she is the wife of Samuel Elmer. She blinks hard, that her lashes might dry her tears, and raises her head again to face the family.
Tuesday
In her green book, Mary could tell the story herself, but for now she is only a woman walking. There is always a woman. And a man. Treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. These lines of Emerson’s come to her. A kind of curse, she thinks, to move through the world with so many words strung together. She could spend a lifetime unraveling and tying on a warp of another’s scraps, never to arrive at her own weaving. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Emerson again. Indeed: Why not?
Samuel was right. He is right about her always.
He exposes her. Her pretense that she belongs on First Avenue, that her errand is ordinary and no reckoning, that the weight of her carpetbag is only domestic: coin for meat and fabric she has brought out to match in a shop on Rivington, and not a book, whose pages, were she to fill them, would tell—that, she is not prepared to say.
So far she has spent her days in New York walking (and making whip-snaps, of course; they’d brought the machine with them; they needed some income; they could not let Samuel provide all), from east to west and back until she had lost track of logic amid the crooked streets of lower Manhattan. She sees with certainty now how impossible her task. Even if she were to walk every street of Manhattan, doing so would not yield up every resident. Anyone who didn’t wish to be found would stay hidden. And to be honest, some small relief she feels in that. She may just as well stop looking, lean back into the plump, goose-down pillow of Chance. Goosey goosey gander, where shall I wander? she mocks herself. Chance at least something she believes in. Accept whatsoever befalls. Emerson.
But she cannot—quite.
It was as if Samuel had been looking in her window as she’d packed and not only had seen how she’d wrapped the green book in her nightgown and tucked it at the bottom of her bag but had surmised from that her every thought—and laughed. With Samuel, that danger existed. That he might dump the things he knew of her through the sieve of his mockery, and then show her—how thin the water that runs through, how ordinary the soil caught in the screen. Why indeed write in notebooks at all? Trying to extricate meaning from day, when the days were all—marching single in an endless file. She is easy prey. For him, at least.
“Still the same girl,” he had whispered to her as she and Edwin were leaving after dinner. And she—she could not say that by her experience, she should have earned more respect than he showed her. Instead she was left speechless, or rather, speechless-feeling (for hadn’t she said something?). She was the same, after all; with that she could not argue. And by that he meant the girl who’d talked with him on Sunday afternoons while his brother sketched by the window. The girl who’d talked of the Stoics, of natural history and the reproduction of worms—of anything. “Edwin acts, while you and I fritter the hours away.” She is the girl who talks with him, instead of filling any notebook. “And what, my dear Mary, do you make of our city?” Always he stakes his claim—“my” Mary, “our” city.
Mary