The picture of Effie Ellsler—his first portrait—still under sheets in the Whiting attic. Then, his youth was excuse enough for its failings (had he, in those days, admitted either youth or failing). But he has no excuse for this painting under his arm. This, the test to be admitted to the Life class. The latest of the week’s three models. The Woman. The Urchin. The Arab. So-called. Misgivings strike him. Something stiff—false—in this practice.
What is this life he has chosen? He—a fifty-year-old man. Probably with more of life behind him than ahead. And he’s now one of a circle of pretentious slicks and—. His mother’s words come to him. Give them the benefit of the doubt. But he is old this morning. Everything irritates. Samuel and his new wife—her smiles, her touch. She’d held his hand until he had felt his palm turn sweaty in hers. Paint’s slow to dry. Skies gray, wet everywhere. And it should be colder. It’s almost as if the seasons are scrambling—as they had when Effie had died, when the rain had melted January’s snow in what should have been its hour of dominion. No, it is not the fault of the other students. He has laughed with them. Shared a drink, once. They are only as young as he and Samuel were, building the house. Already done with Cleveland. Already after first love. They are not so young. It is only that he is old, and he will not see the day—
He has been here before. With cause all the world would grant (their only daughter, dead before her tenth birthday) and none at all. Despondency the same at any age at any place. Worse now. He almost chuckles, to think how bad he feels. Good. Enough light left in him to imagine laughing—if only because now is always the worst and he always the unluckiest.
He had never been convinced that traveling to New York held the promise Mary and Samuel thought. Whatever decision he makes, sadness comes after. To Alaska. To New York. Or taking in his hand the magnifying glass he’d used a hundred times before to inspect the ruffles and wrinkles and eye-sets of the deceased and then turning it upside down in the drinking glass and finding half a tiny world upside down and half a tiny world upright, seeing that and knowing how to paint it, thinking of nothing else until he’d rendered it onto canvas. And then, it was only—a thing done.
“Strange, how absolute the blackness surrounding,” she had said to him.
“Meant it,” he had grumbled.
She hadn’t said she didn’t like it.
But it was strange, probably—and he was strange, to paint that way, with the facts of his life (logs to be stacked, orchard to tend) seen through the window, shrunken and divided in the magnifying glass, which takes up very little of the canvas where it rests in Alma’s glass sugar bowl. Not nearly as much as the expanse of dark around. As if he’d taken it upon himself to embody his father’s monocular vision, with its exacting, compensating stare on the one side and dark on the other.
Neither his father nor he will live to see the day.
He will not live to see the day. He does not know why this phrase comes or what future he mourns. But he is not the only one on whom the calendar weighs: With the century about to turn, all the day’s greatest minds are bent on summation. He’d read last year Albert Michelson’s assessment that most of the grand underlying principles of physical science were firmly established, that further advances were to be sought “chiefly in their rigorous application.” Though he does not recall the exact words, he remembers the sense: Though Michelson had granted the possibility that further marvels were in store—it was good science, to admit the limits of one’s own knowledge—mourning imbued the rest, and was the true spirit, of his remarks. Mourning that only tinkering remained, and not astonishment. The speed of light always the same whether we are coming or going: Michelson himself could not countenance this, even as he proved it so.
Everything had been for Effie. Every word on every page. The house on the hill, its silk damask curtains. The lace collar she’d not had time to finish. Mary cannot believe that she was ever such—a woman with a child growing inside. With milk and not only blood running. Someone with reason to believe in the future and reason to explain the past. Even her handwriting looks oddly rounded now, plump with optimism. Though she must not have felt so at the time, excavating the family troubles. Brother Darwin’s death, Uncle Alfred locked up.
Revelations, she’d quoted for that, as had Alfred himself. The land will be soaked in blood. The children and the rulers and the generals, everyone, slave and free, will scatter and hide in the hills. Hadn’t he been right, in his way, she had wanted to suggest. Thirty years early.
Questions torment her. (Not Edwin, from the look of it.) Uncertainties about—everything. Why for instance words, unless they are for someone? All the earlier pages of the green book had unborn Effie as their audience: With you inside, my Sympathy cannot help but be with young Annie Catlin, whose baby Alfred took from her. Or: Your father emptying Uncle’s bucket and bringing his plate. Four times a day out to the cage (your uncle Samuel paid him to take over his turn). And how is Annie? Uncle Alfred sometimes asked. As tho’ he’d loved her once.
This is the abandoned book she has brought to New York. Perhaps Samuel is right: Completion is not in her nature.
When Edwin returned with the mourning picture, full of the vivid colors of a perfect June day, she thought: Here is our difference. I could never have formed it whole. After all our same years there, I could not have put together even the house. Let alone Effie. Or myself. Or him. When she looked at what he’d painted and tried to see in his eyes where he had learned to do such a thing—what knowledge he harbored—he had turned from her gaze. They were separate, she and Edwin.
She had seen then how her own life, too, would slip away. That she would ever after watch it go. That however many days were left to her on this Earth, she would never quite catch up to them, never embrace them— never even begin to lift her arm to wave good-bye. The shadow of the lilac bushes on her side of the painting blankets her in gloom. How tiny Edwin had made her. Himself, too. The two of them half the size of their own daughter. Right in that, he was: How tall a child grows!—under your very eyes. Big enough to fill the world.
Today’s gray sky and rain the opposite of the clear blue of Edwin’s imagined summer day. They’d never the three of them posed in front of the house like that. Though they’d talked of it, when the Howes brothers passed through town, taking pictures of everyone who could afford the dollar for three prints. Her Totwell cousins won the bean-counting contest and posed for free. But Edwin was opposed to paying someone else to do what he could just as well take care of himself.
She had stopped before writing 1890. But what if she simply wrote: January 1890 The book of no Effie.
Was there no star that could be sent? House and tenant go to ground—
She follows Emerson’s lament for his own young son that far. But she had not any God for comfort, nor conclusion to any verse.
Under Strange, she writes: The last November of the century had a strange heat to it from the start. The past tense, though the month has just begun. The pretense makes her delirious with bravery. The weather was nothing tropical, exactly, but with too much wet for good sense or Capitalists. Not every storm changes the landscape, of course. But tell that to the caterpillar.
She is small, after all. She is three inches high and resides in a single plane. Here is the beginning and the end: a blue sky filled with fractured clouds; the shadow of their lilac bush; red clover and buttercups scattered throughout the lawn; Effie, petting Her Excellency, the oldest sheep. These are the edges of her existence.
Edwin made a box. And she put Effie’s things in it.
She and Edwin sit, in their Sunday-morning best, together. Edwin with the Sunday paper with his beloved weekly math puzzle (of all respondents, only he will answer correctly), she with a fresh ball of pale blue yarn and needles. But not knitting. Staring. Into the eyes of those who will come, who will not know or care who she and Edwin and Effie were.
The house looms behind them,