by Anita Shreve
Also by Anita Shreve
FICTION
Eden Close
Strange Fits of Passion
Where or When
Resistance
The Weight of Water
The Pilot’s Wife
Fortune’s Rocks
The Last Time They Met
Sea Glass
All He Ever Wanted
Light on Snow
A Wedding in December
Body Surfing
Testimony
A Change in Altitude
Rescue
Stella Bain
NONFICTION
Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising Movement
Remaking Motherhood: How Working Mothers Are Shaping Our Children’s Future
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2017 by Anita Shreve, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shreve, Anita, author.
Title: The stars are fire : a novel / Anita Shreve.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032868 (print) | LCCN 2016051553 (ebook) (print) | LCCN 2016051553 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385350907 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385350914 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524711207 (open market)
Subjects: LCSH: Great Fire, Maine, 1947—Fiction. | Life change events—Fiction. | Single mothers—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Sagas. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3569.H7385 S68 2017 (print) | LCC PS3569.H7385 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032868
Ebook ISBN 9780385350914
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover images: Ron Koeberer / Millennium Images, U.K.; Mohamad Itani / Millennium Images, U.K. (details)
Cover design by Kelly Blair
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Contents
Cover
Also by Anita Shreve
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Wet
Dry
Spark
Fire
Cinders
News
Music
Aidan
Snow
Dr. Lighthart
Gene
Epilogue
Grace
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Reading Group Guide
To my husband, with gratitude and love
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Wet
A spring of no spring. Grace pins Gene’s khakis to a line that stretches diagonally over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen. Only heat from the stove will dry the cotton. She holds off on the towels, hoping for a good day tomorrow or the next. On the last beautiful afternoon, over two weeks ago, there was wash on the line in every front porch and backyard. With white sheets, undershirts, and rags flapping in the wind, it looked as though an entire town of women had surrendered.
—
Grace glances at her two children as they nap together in the carriage, the one with the big rubber wheels, the dark navy enameled chassis, and the white leather interior and trim. It is her prized possession, a gift from her mother when Claire was born. It takes up half the kitchen and blocks the hallway when not in use. Claire at twenty months is a hot sleeper and has soaked the collar of her playsuit. Tom, only five months old, is an easy baby. Grace sterilizes the glass bottles and rubber nipples in a saucepan on the stove. Her milk was fitful when she had Claire; she didn’t even try with Tom.
—
When she sleeps with Gene in their marriage bed at night, Grace wears a nightgown, thin cotton in the summer, flannel in the winter. Gene is always naked. Though she would prefer to lie on her back, Gene almost always manages to turn her onto her stomach. She is not built for relations this way. How could she be, never having experienced the god-awful joy that Rosie, her next-door neighbor, once spoke of? On the other hand, the position must be good for making babies.
—
Apart from this unpleasantness, which doesn’t seem important and which, in any event, is over fast, Grace thinks Gene a good husband. He is a tall man with thin hair the color of damp sand. He has midnight blue eyes and a short ropy scar on his chin that stays white no matter what color his face: an angry red, a blushing pink, a January pale, an August tan. He works six days a week as a surveyor, five of them on the Maine Turnpike project, a job that sometimes takes him away for three or four days at a stretch. She imagines his head full of mathematics and physics, measurements and geometry, and yet, when he returns home, he seems enthralled with his children. He is talkative at supper, and Grace knows she is lucky in this since so many of the wives complain about dull silences at home. While she holds Tom in her arms, Gene chats with Claire in her wooden high chair. Grace smiles. These are her happiest moments, with her family in harmony. In many ways, she thinks, her family is perfect. Two beautiful children, a boy and a girl; a husband who works hard at his job and doesn’t resist chores at home. Every night, Gene washes the dishes, seldom complaining about the heavy line of garments that separates the sink from the dish drainer. They live in a shingled bungalow two blocks inland from the ocean. Good investment, Gene always says.
—
Before she goes to bed that night, Grace turns on a burner on the stove, correcting the flame to an inch high. She bends down, holding her hair so that she won’t set it on fire, and lights the last cigarette of the day. The khakis must be dry by morning, and tomorrow she’ll wash the pair Gene wore over the weekend. As she stands by the window, she can’t see the pear tree, but she can hear the rain on its leaves, relentless, never-ending.
Please bring a dry day.
She turns on all the burners and adjusts the flames an inch high, knowing that nothing will catch fire in this wet. She weaves her way through T-shirts and underwear and climbs the stairs.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the stars either.
—
Grace pauses at the landing, takes a breath, and then walks into the bedroom. She slips into her white flannel nightgown. The temperature, she reads on the thermometer just outside the bedroom window, is forty-two.
“More rain tomorrow,” Gene says.
“How long?”
“Maybe the rest of the week.”
Grace groans. “The house will get waterlogged and fall down.”
“Never.”
“Everything is damp. The pages of the books curl.”
“I promise you they’ll dry. Come to bed, Dove.”
She has never been Gracie. Only Grace. And then Dove, with Gene. Grace doesn’t feel like a dove, and she’s sure she doesn’t look anything like a dove, but she knows there’s a sweetness in the nickname. She wonders if it means something that she doesn’t have a fond or funny name for her husband.
—
In the morning, she wakes before Gene so that she can section the grapefruit and prepare his coffee, the grapefruit a rarity that will surprise him. Breakfast will be eggs and toast today, no bacon. Three eggs then. The meal has to last him until his bucket lunch. Ned Gardiner at the grocery store told her yesterday that bakers will now be making smaller bread loaves and one-crust pies as part of the Save Food for Europe campaign. Imagine. An entire continent, starving.
—
Gene never talks about his personal war as an engineer on B-17s, the one during which he got his ropy scar. The other husbands don’t either.
—
She can hear Gene giving himself a sponge bath in the tiny washroom they have squeezed between the two bedrooms upstairs. They bathe once a week in the tin tub Gene keeps on the screened-in porch and drags into the kitchen. He uses her bathwater because it’s too much of an effort to drag the tub out again and empty it onto the ground. Grace has thick brown hair that she cut short right after Tom was born. Gene wasn’t fond of the cut, but her mother thought the new look highlighted her cheekbones and large blue eyes. It was the only time Grace can remember that her mother called her beautiful, an exclamation that escaped her like a bee sting. Gene, when he first met Grace, described her as pretty, which she understood as a description less than beautiful.
Grace, at the moment, doesn’t mind what others think, because living with short hair, if not fashionable, is easier than dealing with pin curls or a set. She tucks it behind her ears. She looks good in a hat. Whenever she goes out she wears clip earrings.
Slightly above average in height, she is tall in heels. She lost the pregnancy weight fast after Tom: Two children under the age of two kept her running most days. She pictures her husband now, bare chested, wetting and soaping a washcloth, getting his face first, then his neck, and finally his underarms. Often he will scrub his wrists. She can hear him tap his razor against the sink. Is he whistling?
Grace wears no makeup except lipstick, a well-blotted mauve. It makes her lips look fuller, Gene says. When she talks to him, he stares at her mouth as if he might be hard of hearing.
She scratches a match against the box it came in and lights a cigarette, inhaling deeply. First of the morning.
—
“What section today?” she asks, savoring the wifely pleasure of watching Gene tear into his grapefruit.
“We’re resurveying the Kittery portion to register the settling.”
Gene has explained to her how he makes three-dimensional elevations and maps for engineers and contractors. She likes the names of the instruments and tools he peruses in catalogs—theodolites and transits, alidades and collimators—but she doesn’t know precisely how they work. Once, when he was courting her, he took her to Merserve Hill and brought out his tripod and tried to teach her how to use the transit, but before she could look into the eyepiece, he positioned her by putting his hands around her waist, and she didn’t hear what he said. She supposes Gene planned it that way. Grace would like to try the outing again and this time pay attention. If the rain ever stops. They could bring the children and make a picnic of it. Highly unlikely that her husband will put his hands around her waist now. Except for a peck when he leaves the house each day and another when he comes home, they seldom touch outside the bed.
“Doesn’t the rain ruin the equipment?” she asks.
“We have special umbrellas. Tarps. What will you do today?”
“I might go over to Mother’s.”
He nods but doesn’t look at her. He would rather she went to his mother’s house for a visit. Relations between his wife and his mother are not all they should be. Does he wish for Grace to bake a two-crust apple pie and take it to her? Should she mention the bakers’ new restrictions? Would he care or would that go into the category of “women’s work,” a subject that allows him to dismiss it?
“I’ve fixed up a canvas hood,” she says.
“Have you now?” He raises his head and seems impressed. He might recognize a certain amount of engineering in the construction of a canvas hood for a carriage. But she would disappoint him if she told him how she did it. She doesn’t use mathematics. Instead she fits and folds and cuts and fits and folds and cuts again, and then she sews. Well, she does measure.
—
She has rigged up a seat so that Claire can sit up in the carriage while Tom lies papoose-like beside her. Tom, the soft fuzz of his dark hair, the pudgy body with its disappearing folds, the warmth of his skin as he burbles; Claire, her white-blond hair in ringlets, short sentences emerging like radio bulletins through static and surprising Grace. Claire, from birth, has always stolen the limelight, first because of her astonishing beauty and now, as is emerging, because of her feistiness. Grace likes nothing more than to lie on her bed with Tom tucked beside her and Claire rolling to her side to put her face close to her mother’s skin. Sometimes they all drift off for a short nap; at other times, they sing.
But as soon as they bump out the door, Claire begins to cry, in seeming sympathy with the rain. Grace knows that Claire’s distress stems from the hood her mother so cleverly designed, the one through which the child can barely see. Or maybe not. Grace wants to cry, too.
—
Her boots have water in them before she reaches the dirt sidewalk. She notes the pink buds of the cherry tree in Rosie’s front lawn. Will they bloom in the rain? She hopes so. It trickles down the edges of her clear plastic head scarf and under her collar. Grace turns onto the first set of stepping-stones she comes to, which leads her to Rosie’s front door. Her friend will be in her tangerine bathrobe, her hair in curlers, but she will invite them in with enthusiasm. Grace cannot face another day trapped inside her own house. She has read all of her “kitchen-table” books, novels not good enough to put inside the glassed-in shelves at the entrance to the dining room. The “kitchen-table” books are full of plot and romance and intrigue.
—
“I brought half a grapefruit,” Grace crows when Rosie opens the door.
Rosie waves them all in, even the baby carriage, which Grace leaves in the vestibule. Looking at her friend’s face, hair, robe, and curlers, all of which more or less match, she imagines Rosie as a column of tangerine flame. Rosie is attractive, even in curlers, but slovenly. Gene once used the word squalor to describe the household. Grace objected then, though she partially agrees.
Rosie scoops Claire up into her arms and at once begins to remove the little girl’s red rain hat and matching slicker. Claire then sinks into Rosie’s chest, and after a moment, Rosie gives the child a fierce hug. But then Claire is on the floor looking for Freddie, the cocker spaniel. Grace, with Tom in her arms, rummages through her handbag and finds the half-grapefruit, carefully wrapped in waxed paper. She gives it to Rosie.
“Where did you get this?” Rosie asks as if she were holding a jeweled egg.
“At Gardiner’s. He got a shipment of six. He let me buy one.”
This isn’t true. He gave it to Grace, and she didn’t object.
“He must have a thing for you,” Rosie teases.
Grace stares Rosie down, and then she begins to smile.
“Can you imagine?” hoots Rosie.
“No!” says Grace, laughing. Rosie squeals at the image.
Ned Gardiner must eat half his produce in the back room, they have decided, because he weighs close to three hundred pounds. His soft stomach hangs over his low belt, and Grace often speculates about how he and his wife, Sophia, once a dark beauty but now nearly two hundred pounds herself, manage in bed. Then Grace feels a pang of conscience for having laughed at a man who gave her a grapefruit.
—
“I’ll split it with you,” Rosie says.
“I’ve had my half,” Grace lies. “You go ahead.”
Rosie’s house seems to be full of things, though Grace notes the lack of a high chair, playpen, or Bathinette. Rosie, too, has a toddler and an infant, a familiar configuration in the neighborhood. Claire has Rosie’s
toddler, Ian, in a headlock.
—
“Tim says he’s had to go out time and time again to tow cars out of the mud,” Rosie remarks as she slowly sucks each grapefruit section. She closes her eyes with pleasure. Tim owns half of an automobile repair shop on Route 1.
“Gene says the ground is so wet, the farmers can’t set their seeds.”
Grace blows smoke away from Tom’s face and takes another pull. “It will end,” she says without conviction.
—
“Coffee, yes?” Rosie asks when she has thoroughly squeezed the life out of the fruit. Grace notes that there’s a seed stuck in a fold of Rosie’s robe. Eddie, Rosie’s youngest, has begun to cry. Grace wasn’t aware that the infant was in the room. She watches as her friend snatches blankets from the couch and picks up a pink baby, Rosie’s coloring exactly. Grace might so easily have sat on Eddie, she thinks with a blip of horror. Containerize, her own mother once told Grace, as if imparting the secret of sanity. Her mother meant children as well as dry goods.
—
“Tonight’s shopping night,” Grace says to her friend, who has opened her robe to reveal a blond nipple and a blue-veined breast. “Need anything?”
Every Thursday night, payday for Gene, he picks Grace and the children up as soon as he pulls into the driveway, and they go straight to Shaw’s. Steak for that night, calves’ liver, bacon, codfish cakes, puffed rice, tomato soup, bologna, eggs, butter, chipped beef, canned salmon, canned peas, hot dogs, buns, baked beans, brown bread, and Rice Krispies. Gene removes his pay packet from his pocket and counts out the bills and quarters and nickels and dimes and pennies with care. Everything else—milk, bread, hamburger—can be bought at Gardiner’s when needed. Grace tries to have some amount of protein every night, though by Wednesday the meal is Spanish rice with bits of bacon.
“How are you drying the diapers?” Rosie asks.
