A letter with a postmark August 1883—from an Undergraduate writing silly nursery poems: Mary, Mary, no longer Wary. (I am, tho’, so.)
Blue and ivory eggs in a nest—“Perfection,” agreed Edwin and Samuel. And they set out to plumb the mysteries of an egg: the one brother to measure and sketch, the other to describe. (Or entertain, in the event that Perfection proved unattainable.)
Stones—tho’ not the gray misshapen monstrosities I stacked to the left of my garden (forgive me if I want something more beautiful than that). Maybe river stones, made round and smooth by water’s Constancy. Each perfect as an egg. Effie used to collect them. Those with stripes down their center and those of deep color, all ovaled and polished to the touch, she named magic. Rough-edged rocks, with flecks of mica, “civilized magic.” When I asked her what she meant, she said, “You know, Mama, not so much. They don’t have the singing.” Where on Earth did she learn a word like Civilized, and to put song outside it?
I buried her pouch of magic stones with her.
I can collect more (will chips of cobblestones and other City rocks suffice?) and fashion my own bag. In case I need to drop them one by one behind me.
Wasn’t that the trick, in nursery stories, for those who feared becoming lost? But this method will not do for Mary. Anything draws her interest. Stones. Galaxies—that ours might not be the only civilization in the universe, and the corollary: If our civilization is so small, then what of one person? A speck on the earth. All opinion and desire even less.
One year she and Effie had kept the clippings from their fingernails, to see how such tiny slivers might accumulate (a cubic inch per year? Buried, would they decompose?) Then months went by; they forgot about that experiment. Though still a faint shadow of plans conceived and plans abandoned darkens the sky when she brushes nail clippings off the windowsill. Samuel is right about her. About her fits and starts.
Very well. Mary flips the book back over, and—as if possessed, she thinks—adds dates like things:
1849, 1850 Susan Smith Elmer gives birth to her eleventh and twelfth children: Samuel and Edwin Romanzo
1860 Mary Jane Ware born
1876 Elmer Bros. (with help of Cousin John) finish the Bray Road house
Congressional Committee reopens case of the Andersonville prison. Confederates claim they repeatedly sought release of prisoners and movement of surgeons and medical supplies and were denied by the Union government
This clipped information reminds only her and would not convey to anyone else how those hearings had devastated her. The betrayal: Her father had died at Andersonville, and need not have, she understood in her sixteenth summer. His life—anyone’s life—worth nothing in the war-makers’ strategic equation. She might have written that: 1876 Trust no government. A realization that turned her more impetuous than she’d already been. More likely to climb out her bedroom window to commune in the fields with a man a decade her senior.
1878 Samuel marries Alma Whiting
2 November 1879 Edwin Romanzo Elmer and Mary Jane Ware, Halifax, Vermont
29 June 1880 Effie Lillian born
1882 Alma dies of pneumonia
1883 Summer visitors in the Buckland house
1884 S. buys our interest in Buckland house and moves to Boston. We remain in the house, Maud with us for meals, Samuel home weekends
1885 Edwin’s roof bracket receives patent
Alma’s mother, Sarah Whiting, dies
Maud goes to live with Samuel
1886 E. invents machine for twisting and braiding silk thread into whip-snaps (S’s company manufactures the horse whips; snaps attached at the factory)
For many years, she’d met the train early Monday morning with a package of 150 snaps to send off to the factory in Westfield. Not that she wishes to dwell on this. Enough that Edwin painted her at his invention, a glow round her head, threads flickering through her fingers. She was not like that. Still, the painting deserves a place in her chronology. A Lady of Bishop Corner (Wife of the Artist). Later. When she gets there. After Effie died, must have been, for she’d worn her mourning clothes.
Whip-snaps are not what she wishes to write about. The pages of a history need not be apportioned as the hours spent. Such a book, if hers, would be devoted one-third to sleep (with its dreams, thank goodness), one-third to food (its growing, its preparation), and one-third to fiber (plying, braiding, weaving, knitting, crocheting, sewing, scrubbing, mending). As for all else—human interaction and reading and walking abroad in the world—mere addenda? Jimmy Roberts only a footnote?
No. She wants another sort of history: The book of what was not. An impossible problem. She sees Samuel laughing. Go ahead, Mary Elmer. Write what cannot be written.
In the book of what was not—there she might write of Jimmy Roberts. But if this is the Elmer family history? The years stand in a line, silent accusers: 1887 1888 1889.
How small a date in a book appears. Born four letters same as dies. And born a sound more like dying, a thud on the earth. And dies more alive—the I like fire. One could make quite a bit of nothing. Or nothing of an entire life. Emerson comes to her again: I forgot my morning wishes. Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day turned and departed silent. I, too late—
She is in the afternoon of her life, and evening has always startled and saddened her. She does not know how to write what she wants to say. I, too late—. Jimmy Roberts came one August and took her heart. Nellie’s baby born the same week Ma Whiting died. “You best hold her,” she told Samuel, as she put the bundle that was Gracie in his lap. The closest she’d ever come to giving him a child. The strange ticking of complicity when she galloped off after, down Bray Road into town to tell Dave the news.
No, what little she’d managed to write had hardly anything to do with life as she remembered it, let alone as she’d wished it.
She contemplates the page marked Strange. She has entered the door at 51 First Avenue, she has opened the pages of the green book, and she is none the different. Jimmy Roberts is nowhere to be seen, nor Nellie. And none of this a dream, unless life is.
Look—there Edwin is, crossing the park on his way to the National Academy of Design, with a painting tucked under his arm.
He stops and bends to the ground, gathers a handful of leaves and brings them up to breathe deeply of their damp. And the facts he uses to order his life fall away: Edwin Romanzo Elmer, student of Walter Satterlee, A.N.A. Admitted to all classes of the Academy save one. Born, Ashfield, Massachusetts. Husband, brother. Father, once.
New York has put him strangely in the mood of retrospect. Strange, because so much new assaults his eye. Isn’t that what he wanted, coming here? Retreating into the past now a cowardice he must trounce out of himself. Seeing Samuel last night caused it. And Mary’s set face when they left. And being in a city again (little though New York resembles Cleveland): The movement stirs him, unsettles; his thoughts race. They could go—forward—or back.
The leaves have already frozen and melted, and they fall apart in his hands, their skeletal webs only a clue to their original form, their substance reduced to dark crumbs. But the smell of them—slightly sour?— with something rich and loamy buried beneath their first affront.
His shovel had hit the leaves first, and they were harder to break