by Annie Proulx
But Dieter thought it must have taken courage to write that letter. “She has spirit. Does she have brains? Do you know her?”
“I never met her. I just knew she existed. It’s lächerlich, a woman wanting to learn how to scale logs. A rich girl’s passing fancy, something she heard about but hasn’t any idea of the reasons or procedures.” He crumpled and tossed the letter into the woodbox near the fireplace. It was Dieter who plucked it from the woodbox the next day and answered the letter himself, offering his personal instruction if she could manage to come to Monroe for a week.
“I hope you have some knowledge of mathematics,” he wrote. “Few women do, but familiarity with numbers is quite essential in estimating log volumes. I would be pleased to tutor you in the rudiments of the art and if it is to your liking you may advance to more difficult problems.” He thought she would not reply; he made the work sound disagreeable and difficult. She wrote back with a list of dates she could be in Monroe and assured him she had no fear of arithmetic nor mathematics and particularly enjoyed calculus above all things—not quite the truth.
57
a cure for headache
For James there was one highly annoying disadvantage to living in Detroit—his wine cellar remained in the Boston house and in Detroit there were rivers of whiskey but no wineshop. It had always been his intent to have his cellar shipped, but he shuddered when he thought how many good bottles would suffer from stirred-up sediments and take years to settle down. The longer it took to arrange for the packing and shipping the more he pined for the dark dusty bottles of choice Madeiras and clarets in their silent racks. His mouth watered. Dinner without wine was insipid. There was no pleasanter end to a day than a glass of port and a cigar by the fire.
James and Lavinia made a point of dining together at each other’s table in turn. This night it was James’s house. After dinner—venison roast with baked apples, potato soufflé and small business talk—in the library, each with a glass of whiskey, he said, “Lavinia, I am determined to return to Boston and arrange to have my wine crated and shipped here. While I am gone—I will be about six weeks away—I’m having a carpenter put bottle racks in this cellar. Of course I shall stay at Black Swan, though likely eat out, visit my tailor and bankers. Where did I put my—there they are.” He hung the cord of his pince-nez around his neck. “I’ve spoken to Cyrus and he said that while I am away anything you wish he will help you procure.” Cyrus was becoming hard of hearing and it meant strenuous shouting to explain anything to him.
“I shall do very well, Papa, and look forward to your return and perhaps a glass of champagne?”
“Oh, we will have a champagne gala,” said James. “You and I and Cyrus and Clara. I shall bring all the news of Boston with me as well as wine. If there is anything I may fetch for you give me a little list. Why not let me choose a new dress for you—something colorful?”
“Books, Papa, I would have some new books. That is all I want.” And, thought Lavinia, when you return I will know how to scale logs.
• • •
But two days before his departure he came storming to Lavinia’s house in a froth. She invited him into the little parlor with the deep green velvet curtains making a dusky forest-like gloom; the gilt tassels glinted dully. She sat on a chair, ankles crossed; he strode up and down. “Daughter, I have just made an unpleasant discovery. I am sorry to say this but that rascal, Andre Roque, cannot accompany you again on any trips whatsoever.”
“May I ask why not?” said Lavinia. “I have always found him to be most accommodating.”
“I daresay,” sneered James, continuing to stamp across the carpet.
“Oh do sit down, Papa, sit down. And tell me calmly, what has he done? What is wrong? Why?”
James sat on the edge of a large, throne-like chair. “Why! Never mind, it is not something for a young girl to hear.”
She sat straight, both feet flat on the floor, a combative attitude. “Let me remind you I am no longer a ‘young girl’ but almost a woman grown—and with a masculine mind as you have several times remarked. I am immune from vapors and fainting. I demand to know why you are forbidding me his company and protection.” Her dark eyes glinted and the red mouth pressed into a knot.
Now he was really irritated. “Very well, since you fancy yourself so advanced in worldly experience I’ll tell you that Andre Roque has got his sister with child. He cannot be trusted with females. Some men are that way.” He thought of his lascivious old father-in-law. “I do not want him to travel with you again.” He waited for her shocked exclamation.
Lavinia said coolly, “I suppose it comes from all the children sleeping in the same bed.”
“How would you know that!” He was back on his feet.
“I surmise it, that is all.”
“A piece of advice, Miss Lavinia. Surmising is the way to the greatest error. Never surmise, never.” But what he really feared was that Lavinia might have a streak of Posey’s abandoned ways and the hostler’s son would sniff it out and give him an illegitimate grandchild.
“I quite agree that surety is preferable to the most advanced surmising,” said Lavinia, “I will do as you say,” and she offered him tea.
• • •
Back at the old house in Boston, James was struck by its shabby condition. The familiar interior was musty and chill with an air of fatigue, the furniture, especially the hall stand, seemed cruelly old-fashioned. The rooms looked rather mean. He thought they should not copy every detail in the new house but simply sell Black Swan as it stood and start anew in Detroit. He would have a talk with the architect while he was in Boston and cancel the copycat plans—present Lavinia with a fait accompli when he returned to the lake country.
• • •
Mr. Prentiss, his wine merchant for many years, was excited to see his second-best customer again. His wattled red face contrasted with his pink turkey neck stretching naked above the new style of low collar and bow tie, and James thought he should have kept to a high stock that would keep him decently covered. The merchant flapped his hands open as though inviting James to dance and said, “I am delighted to see you again, Mr. Duke. Are you returning? Oh, just a visit, tsk. How may I help you? Would you like to know of the new wines? I have some really good German hock. At your service, sir,” and he made a body movement very like a bow. Nothing had changed in the wineshop, the same dusty musty smell, Mr. Prentiss clucking and nodding.
“Mr. Prentiss, you look well and I trust you do well. Indeed, just a visit. And as much as I would like to explore the hock I have come on a different errand. I wish to have my cellar crated and shipped to new quarters in Detroit. But I fear breakage and disturbance will wreak havoc on the contents unless the job is carefully undertaken. Can you advise me of the best way we may do this?”
“Mr. Duke, to disturb those hundreds of bottles, to crate and jostle them halfway across the continent would ruin a great portion. It would be a true sin. Why not trade with me—a move from your cellar to my shop is not a great journey. In exchange I will give you a greater measure of aged Madeira or whatever else you like in casks and barrels that can stand the trip without damage.”
“That seems a logical course of action. Let us do it.” They spoke for a while and then the merchant asked offhandedly if Freegrace’s cellar had been sold or passed to a family member.
“It passed to me,” said James. “Freegrace’s will left it to Edward, but Edward’s possessions have become mine. I haven’t thought of Freegrace’s cellar though I always heard it was very good.” His eyes kept straying to the bottles. He looked forward to an excellent dinner—with wine and more wine.
“Very good! I should say it was very good! Among the best in Boston.” He coughed. “If you think of disposing of it I would be interested in buying. I would never consider moving those rare bottles any distance.”
“Well,” said James. “I do not know the extent of what he had. But I have a set of keys at my house. Shall we meet tomorrow
morning and examine what is there?”
“Nothing would delight me more,” said Mr. Prentiss, suddenly sneezing.
“Shall we meet here at ten?”
“Excellent. Now, Mr. Duke, will you take a glass of amontillado with me?”
“I will,” said James. “It will set me right. I keep having bouts of malaise.”
“Are you sure you would not rather have a hot toddy?”
“No, no, amontillado is what I crave. And please send a half dozen of the hock you mentioned round to Black Swan—I must have something to drink while I am here, though I can certainly make inroads on my cellar.”
“I advise it,” said Mr. Prentiss. “If you have special wines this visit would be the very best time to enjoy them. Now, just step into the tasting room.”
James felt it was good to be back in Boston. And tonight, he said to himself, a very good dinner.
• • •
He had a headache the next morning and sent it on its way with a large glass of champagne and the most savorous coffee he’d had in a year, taken at Bliss’s Coffee House, where not even the waiter had changed—old Henry with the great wen on his chin, who greeted him by name. The morning was sharp with frost, the hired horse lively. He drove up to the wineshop, where Mr. Prentiss’s florid smiling face floated in the window. The door opened and the wine merchant skipped out carrying an abacus and a notebook.
“I heard that Mr. Freegrace Duke kept a cellar book and I thought I would count bottles with this”—he held the instrument aloft—“and take a few notes.” He was in high humor.
It seemed to James he had never left Boston so familiar was this street, the clopping of the horse. “Brisk day,” he said. The headache was quite gone. He felt very well; sea air was certainly healthier than lake vapors. “He-up!”
“Brisker to come. The almanac promises a hard winter. I suppose the winters are pleasanter in Michigan?”
“I would not say that,” said James, “never would I say that.”
Inside Freegrace’s house everything was coated with dust. There were a great many tracks on the floor. No sheets protected the furniture. The house was bitterly cold.
“Only a few months ago, I paid his butler a year’s salary to stay on and look after the place until we could make arrangements,” said James. “It looks as though he left as soon as I did. What was the fellow’s name—Eccles, I think. I will look into this. Damn, I will have him taken up! Well, never mind. Let us find a lantern and some candles and go down into the cellar.”
The door to the cellar was ajar and as they went down the broad stairs James noticed chunks of plaster and mud on the stairs and gouge marks on the wall.
“I don’t like the look of this,” he said, pointing at the plaster dust with his toe. Mr. Prentiss made a clucking sound. He knew what they would find; he had seen it once before.
The bottle racks were empty, the cask cradles empty, shelves tipped over. Broken glass glinted in the light of their lantern and the air had a winy stench. Freegrace’s wine cellar had been stripped.
They turned to each other and spoke as one: “the butler!” And James was impressed to see tears in Prentiss’s little eyes. The Adam’s apple bobbed in his turkey neck.
James drove Prentiss back, then went to the new-formed police office, and told of Freegrace’s missing wine. Two men James thought rather thick-minded came with him and looked at the shambles in the cellar. They pointed out circles in the dust on the sideboards where silver chafing dishes and other ornaments had once stood. In five minutes they concluded that a criminal gang of immigrants must have done the deed. “Comin in Boston by the t’ousand,” said one, likely an immigrant himself, thought James.
“But the butler—” he said to no response. They went out. He went into the library, for what he did not know, picked up the several old copies of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine on the table—something to read at least.
He returned to Mr. Prentiss and made the arrangements to exchange most of his bottles for casks of Madeira to travel by cart to Albany, then by canal and lake steamer to Detroit.
“At least we can do that much.” But he saw the wine merchant was still grieving the loss of Freegrace’s cellar and shifting James’s wines would be little consolation.
“The terrible sin of that theft. I’ll warrant the swine did not know what they had. I have heard for years that Mr. Freegrace possessed Château d’Yquem sauternes from Thomas Jefferson’s private cellar—the 1784 vintage. And I heard of a 1792 vintage Madeira. Madeira is truly the prince of old wines, at its best after half a century. The 1792 would just now be coming into maturity. Open a fine old bottle and it fills the room with such rich deep aromatics—” He broke off and turned away from the light.
• • •
The actual taking up of the Black Swan bottles, and Mr. Prentiss’s excruciatingly slow methods of packing and transferring the bottles to his shop delayed James’s return by nearly ten days. The blazing autumn faded and November rain began the morning after Guy Fawkes Day, which Bostonians still called Pope Day, drowning the last smoldering bonfires. A day or two later the first line storm to screech off the Atlantic shook the oak outside his old bedroom window and brought down the dead leaves.
The house agent called. He had sent a letter saying that he represented a leading Bostonian and wished to discuss a real estate purchase with Mr. Duke. James knew the man was the son of one of the shareholders in the New England Mississippi Land Company, which a few decades earlier had enjoyed a controversial congressional appropriation of more than a million dollars. Now the son, who had inherited the windfall, offered $90,000 for Black Swan and its grounds. James pretended reluctance and was finally persuaded to part with the property, house and all its contents (save his small inlaid table, which would travel with him to Detroit) for a rather larger sum. The next day he put Edward’s place, Freegrace’s rifled mansion and even Lennart Vogel’s handsome brick Federal-style house in the agent’s hands. A week before Thanksgiving he began his own return passage. The wine would follow.
• • •
In his stateroom on the steamer Liberty Tree he read the last Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and was disturbed by a story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the opening paragraphs unpleasantly reminiscent of his cousin’s ravaged house. He had a sore throat. He was coming down with a cold. The worst place to have a cold was on a steamer on Lake Erie in winter. In his valise he had a copy of Nicholas Nickleby for Lavinia. He would read this. So the last leg of the tedious and cold journey began with James wincing at the antics of Mr. Squeers, who certainly would not have balked at stealing a cellarful of wine.
He felt it before he knew what he felt. His own marine experience lay in the days of sail on the Atlantic but he sensed the change in the beat of the inland sea, the increasingly labored response of the steamer. He knew that the Great Lakes and especially Erie were among the most treacherous waters of the earth and that the winter storms wrecked ships as men trod wildflowers. Duke & Sons had lost two lumber boats the last winter, delighting settlers along the shore with planks that floated to them with no labor but to bend over and pick them up. He read on but felt the cold. When he got up to search for his heavy coat he nearly fell with the ship’s violent pitch. He could hear it groaning now, every timber twisting as the vessel gyred through mountainous waves. He put on his coat, a hat, heavy gloves and went out on deck.
A savage wind blew spume off the tops of the waves. It was a fresh gale and God, God it was cold! His first breath of the sharp air wakened his old headache, which struck like a hurled rock. Ice formed as he watched—along the rail, on the deck, on every rope, the hatch covers, heavy deep blue ice, tons of it. With fascination he watched it glaze the front of his coat. He felt his eyebrows weighted. The footing was treacherous. Passengers coming out of their cabins to see how the ship did gasped in the searing cold and one heavy man immediately fell and slid across the deck, but was able to cling to the bottom rail. He could not
get up again and at each lurch of the ship his feet swung outward over the abyss. James saw ice forming on the man’s legs. Could James reach him? He could not. He looked for rope, saw a coil, but it was frozen in a great lump of ice. Passengers were clinging to anything they could reach. James wondered if he could get back to his cabin and tried a step without relinquishing his hold on the rail. His foot skidded and he gave it up. People were shrieking now, calling, “Help, help.” Never in his life had he felt such cold. Two icicles hung from his snotty nostrils. The fallen man suddenly shot away under the rail and into Erie. The entire ship was sealed in a casket of ice a foot thick, and it labored and wallowed in the troughs of the waves—slower, lower. Why had no crewmen chipped ice as soon as it started to form, James wanted to ask, but his mouth could not shape the words. Through the sheeting spray he thought he saw land nearby, less than a mile distant. They were making for a local harbor or at least the lee of an island, and he felt cheered. He would last—he’d been through worse. The wind pushed the helpless Liberty Tree on and a quarter mile from a desolate stump-choked shore she smashed onto the foaming rocks; he knew he would never drink that damn Madeira, but with a bizarre sense of victory he felt his headache become a dwindling spicule.
• • •
Cyrus had the news first from the steamship owner and came for Lavinia.
“We must go there,” she said. “We cannot wait. It is my father. We must go to him.” It took them two days to reach the shore near the wreck through some of the coldest weather of the century. Cyrus was exhausted by Lavinia’s agitation, her restless head-tossing and weeping. The bitter temperatures persisted until the entire Erie shore humped up in crystalline domes of ice. Among the stumps, converted to glittering ice cylinders, they found thirty-odd frozen bodies where loggers, summoned from their chopping work a mile distant, had laid them. The passengers were frozen in angular postures just as they had been when the blood solidified in their veins. Many had hands crooked in their last grasp of rope or rail, and the faces fixed in final expressions of struggle or resignation. The captain in his ice uniform held an ice watch in his solid hand. They found James, congealed eyes glaring up at the sky, his tight lips narrow as a crack. Lavinia touched his marble cheek. She looked at Cyrus. He made a hopeless gesture and said, “We shall meet him in heaven.” Some of the shanty men were trying to salvage the last bits of rigging and spars still tumbling in the heavy surf. Lavinia called to a man whose rounded back and sloping shoulders she somehow knew.
