The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  He pulls her toward him, so that her head rests in the crook of his arm. She floats—placid and perfect. His breathing changes, and she knows the moment he loses consciousness. She thinks it lovely to have him sleeping beside her, as if they were indeed a couple, as if they had all the time in the world. She will leave him before he wakes so that there will be no need to say goodbye.

  —

  For the first time in a week, Grace sleeps so deeply that when she opens her eyes, the children are already up. She puts on her robe and runs downstairs.

  “He’s gone,” her mother says.

  Grace is silent.

  “He took his suitcase.”

  Again, she doesn’t speak.

  “He stripped his bed,” her mother adds.

  Snow

  Against the windows, the snow falls in dry sheets. The wind thumps at the front of the house, and from some of the rooms Grace can hear it howl. She prepares a fire, but won’t light it until the power goes out, nearly inevitable in a nor’easter. Her mother collects all the candles she can find and sets them in holders or sticks them to dessert plates by lighting the wicks and letting hot wax drip to the dishes. Grace checks the cupboards and refrigerator for food and supplies and decides that Aidan has done a good job of provisioning the house. They can live on what they have for at least five days.

  Aidan. She puts her forehead to the cold glass of the window. She wants to howl like the wind.

  She won’t wash Aidan’s sheets until the storm is over. If she did, and the machine stopped mid-wash, the linens would be coated with soap for days. Alone, in a darkened corner, she lifts the bundle to her face. She can smell Aidan on them. Would she be able to smell herself? She is tempted to look for evidence of their time together, but she drops the sheets to the floor.

  She pictures the train he was on moving away from the storm as it made its way toward Boston. There, she imagines, he will walk to his audition if he can’t find a taxi. She glances at her watch: 11:20. How many hours since he made love to her? Thirteen?

  —

  By two o’clock in the afternoon, two feet of snow has fallen. When the sun sets, three feet push against the sides of the house. All day, Grace has been shoveling to keep the steps and a short path clear, though what good it will do them, she can’t imagine. It’s a path to nowhere—not to a car, not to the street. She supposes she ought to have shoveled to the barn, but for what purpose?

  She has a wild and desperate urge to put on her coat and hat and gloves and slide down to the street and walk south in hopes of catching a ride to Boston. Can it be done?

  The snow is too deep and she wouldn’t be able to tell the road from the beach. She might wander into the sea. She might lose her balance in the blizzard and fall into a snowbank and die there.

  She has children.

  —

  The onset of evening begins well enough—the snow has been steady—but by seven o’clock, the wind picks up again, and shortly after that, the electricity stops. A tree, perhaps weakened by the fire, has fallen onto an electric wire.

  “We’re in it now,” her mother says.

  —

  Grace tucks Claire into a soft armchair and sees apprehension in her daughter’s face. “Mommy, stay next to me.” Grace kneels on the floor to rub her daughter’s back until she falls asleep. Grace has made a nest for Tom and herself with a pile of rugs on the floor in front of the fire screen. She makes up a bed for her mother on the sofa. The high upholstered back will help to capture the heat.

  “There’s a fair amount of wood on the back porch,” her mother says. “I hope it outlasts the power outage.”

  “It has to.”

  Grace then remembers the water pipes. In the kitchen, she turns on the tap at the sink, running as little water as possible, but keeping the flow steady. She doesn’t want the pipes to burst in what will shortly become a frozen house. She does a similar thing with all the faucets in the bathrooms, making sure there are no stoppers in the sinks and tubs, and when she ventures down into the basement, candle in hand, she discovers a large sink with a faucet.

  “We have the stove for warmth when we need it,” Grace says to her mother. “Refrigeration won’t be a problem—at least not yet.”

  “Wish we’d listened to the radio before the power went out. Then we might know how long it will snow for.”

  What good would that have done? Grace asks herself. It’s not as though they have somewhere else to go. She remembers the families in the tin houses. Electricity only, and when that went…She hopes the people were evacuated before the storm got rough.

  —

  Despite exhaustion, Grace periodically untangles herself from the nest, lights a candle, and brings a pile of wood into the sitting room via a red wagon her mother found in the nursery. Because the journey is cold, she works fast to build up a good fire. When she’s done, she holds the top blanket close to the fire screen and then lays it over Tom and herself.

  —

  The four eat in the kitchen, their hats and jackets on, the warmth from the stove saving the room from being intolerably cold. Marjorie prepares oatmeal, determined to get a hot breakfast into them. She warms the maple syrup, which is as thick as sludge from the cold, and pours it over the cereal. Marjorie urges Grace to eat an entire bowl. “This is no time to be fussy about food.”

  Grace wants to tell her mother that her lack of appetite has nothing to do with fussiness.

  —

  “I have an idea,” Marjorie announces to Grace. “The sitting room is massive, and the heat dissipates. We could move into the library instead, which is smaller. There’s a fireplace and a bed. You could sleep there with both the children, and we could bring in the sofa and put it against the wall, and I’ll sleep there. If we shut the door, we’ll be fine.”

  Grace experiences her mother’s proposition as a gift. To sleep in Aidan’s bed is to stay connected to him, if only for a few more days.

  “I’ll find some clean sheets,” her mother burbles happily, “and we have plenty of blankets. We’d better bring in toys for the children and books to read by candlelight.”

  —

  In the library, Grace starts a fire in the grate. She and her mother drag the sofa in. Her mother makes up the two beds, so that they are ready for evening, though it is only ten in the morning. After Grace gathers her small family into the library, she wants to lie on the bed and think of Aidan.

  She changes the children’s clothing, and then enters the frigid bathroom just off the library to change her own. It’s so cold, she doesn’t want to sit on the toilet seat. She has brought from Merle’s closet a wool sweater, pants, and a scarf. After she wraps her coat around her and puts on her gloves, she places Merle’s mink turban on her head; there’s a great deal of wood to bring in and to store just outside the library door. From her mother-in-law’s closet, she’s taken the warmest and smallest items she could find for her mother. Marjorie swims in the mink jacket but doesn’t refuse it.

  Before Grace leaves the bathroom, she opens the medicine cabinet to see if Aidan left anything behind. But the metal shelves are empty.

  —

  By eleven o’clock in the morning, Grace, Claire, and Tom have made a fort out of all the pillows and cushions; they play in it in woolen coats, as if they were outside and making an igloo. Marjorie has braved the frigid kitchen to bring spoons and small plates, so that Grace and Claire can delineate the “kitchen” from the “living room.” Tom, delighted to be playing with his mother’s and sister’s full attention, crawls and rolls and delivers deep belly laughs. He sits on plates and knocks over cushions, eliciting his sister’s fury. When it’s time for their naps, Grace crawls into the fort, her legs sticking out, and reads them stories. She, too, falls asleep with her head in the kitchen.

  —

  Grace stumbles, snow blind, outside. She squints in the bright sun. The world is covered in white, which seems, with its crusty surface, to be a heavy blanket of sparks stretching
as far as she can see. Even the ocean has frozen near the shoreline, and she can see blue water only a hundred feet out to sea. These blasts from nature that make it so hard to live are sometimes beautiful. The fire, in its essence, was sublime; the quiet world around her covered in snow is as still as glass.

  The beauty makes her miss Aidan with an ache that feels unbearable. She replays the night they had together, moment by moment. Will she spend her life missing him?

  Two boys with shovels call to her from the bottom of the long driveway. She can’t hear them, but she nods vigorously. Whatever they will charge her when they make it to the top, she’ll pay. She steps inside the house to search for stray coins.

  The silence in the house is haunting. The music, which was magical, has vanished. When she entered the old Victorian, she heard the piano and Aidan playing it. The loss is in her skin, along her backbone.

  —

  Grace takes the children out to see the magic blanket. Tom claps his mittened hands and laughs. Claire steps into the snow, which swallows her. To help Claire, Grace sets Tom, for just a moment, onto the shoveled path, itself now deep in snow. She stops Claire’s tears by making a snowball and teaching her to throw it. Turning, Grace discovers Tom facedown in the snow. She brushes him off and sits with him on the stoop. Claire makes tiny ineffectual snowballs that barely dent the white blanket.

  —

  The following day, the power returns, but it’s an hour before anyone notices. It’s only when Grace rounds the corner to the sitting room with a reading lamp lit that she sees Aidan in his usual chair. She gasps with happiness; he’s returned to her! The illusion lasts only a second, however: She covers her eyes and bends forward to protect what little self she has left.

  After a few minutes, she enters the kitchen and flips all the switches.

  “Oh, thank God,” her mother says.

  Grace might say the same, though she is fizzy with longing.

  —

  That evening, Grace and her mother wash all the bedding, dry it, and remake the beds. The children seem to like sleeping on the third floor with their toys and their grammy. Marjorie is pleased, and Grace is relieved. She needs a night to herself.

  In her room, Merle’s room, she turns the light on in the closet to look for warmer clothes suitable for job hunting in the snow. She happens upon a brown wool suit, half hidden and overshadowed by the more beautiful dresses surrounding it. She tries on the jacket and decides that if she wears a sweater under it, it will fit her. The skirt, however, is too wide. Grace takes the skirt to the bed, examines it, and realizes that it has an elastic waist. If she gently gathers the elastic, she can make the skirt work. It will have bulges at the hips, but the jacket will cover them. She removes the brown skirt from its hanger and sits with it on the bed. While studying the hem, she feels hard lumps inside the wool. Weights. Women sometimes put them in the hems of thick material to give a skirt more drape. With a pair of snipping scissors from the dressing table, Grace begins to cut the stitches of the hem. After a foot, Grace tilts the skirt so that the weights will fall out. Instead of a weight, however, a ring falls into her palm.

  Grace drops it onto the bedspread as if it had singed her. A large sapphire is surrounded by diamonds in a gold setting. The ring is too big for Grace, but she isn’t at all interested in the fit. Instead, she’s curious about why Merle felt it necessary to hide it in the hem of a dull brown skirt.

  She shakes all the weights out of the hem. There are six rings: a large diamond set in gold; a silver dinner ring with a massive emerald; a ruby surrounded by pearls; another diamond ring, this one set with two sapphires on either side; and a large ruby, multifaceted, in a gold setting. Grace lays them out side by side on the bedspread. Apart from movie reels of Jewish refugees hiding their valuables in their coats, Grace has never heard of such a thing. Did Merle not trust her staff?

  Hundreds of dollars’ worth of jewelry dot the bedspread. Did Gene know about this? Did Merle tell Gene as she lay on her deathbed? To think that Grace might so easily have taken Merle’s clothes to the Salvation Army! Did Merle undo her own hems when she wanted to wear the sapphire and diamond ring? Was the large diamond her engagement ring, put away after her husband died? More curious still, are there other treasures hiding in the wardrobe?

  Grace stands and paces Merle’s room, glancing from time to time at the gems on the bedspread. She slips a cigarette from the pack in her pocket, lights it, and inhales deeply. With the rings alone, she would have a deposit for a house for her mother. Grace could buy a car. But the treasure on the bed is contraband. It doesn’t belong to her. If anything, it belongs to Gene, and until Gene is declared dead, if he did indeed die, it’s his to keep or to sell. But does she really believe this? If she has assumed that the house is hers by right of marriage to a missing husband, isn’t she entitled to its contents as well?

  No. Sleeping in Merle’s house was an act of desperation. Selling her jewelry is a tacit admission that Grace’s husband is dead. Grace doesn’t know the contents of Gene’s will, or even if he has one. She has never seen such a document, having always assumed they would get around to writing them someday in the future. But did Gene, knowing what he stood to inherit, write one after his mother died?

  Merle wouldn’t have put her jewelry in her best clothes—too great a chance of ruining an expensive dress. Grace wanders into the oversize closet and begins to feel the hems of lesser dresses. With several items selected, she brings them to the bed, having put the discovered rings into a clean ashtray. She picks up her snipping scissors.

  Grace lays the additional treasures in the center of the bedspread. A string of pearls. A pair of diamond clip earrings. A gold bracelet with ten diamonds. An emerald brooch. A diamond and ruby brooch. A diamond hatpin. A massive diamond necklace that dazzles with its beauty. A heavy gold bracelet. An emerald necklace with twenty-two stones. A gold watch, diamonds encircling the face. At least a dozen screw earrings with precious gems.

  The pile in the center of the bedspread scintillates.

  The pile in the center of the bedspread screams an unspeakable amount of money.

  The pile in the center of the bedspread isn’t hers.

  —

  Grace fingers the gold bracelet with ten diamonds, the only item for which she has a record. In the morning, she’ll carry the bracelet into Biddeford with the invoice and explain that her mother-in-law has died and can no longer pay the bill. If the jeweler takes the bracelet back from Grace, that will be that. If some portion of the bill has been paid, the jeweler might take the bracelet back and give Grace a small amount of money for it. And that will be that. She can’t pocket any of the rest of the jewels. They aren’t hers. For the first time since Grace entered the Victorian to stay, she wishes wholeheartedly that Gene would come back to her.

  She won’t tell her mother about the diamond bracelet.

  —

  The journey into Biddeford lasts an hour longer than it ought to. Some of the roads are plowed, some are not, resulting in a tortuous route of detours. A few of the passengers mind; Grace is patient, enjoying the views outside the window.

  When she is let out in the city, she climbs a long hill of brick buildings and realizes these are the mills. She notes the snow still bundled at the sills and sides of the long paned windows, and as she passes close to them, she can hear the din from the sidewalk: wooden shuttles sound like iron machines clanging against each other as if in battle. Through a pane of glass, she catches sight of a powder of tiny cotton threads released into the air. She crosses the street hoping to find the center of town only to discover she is already there. Branching off Main Street are rows of multistory boardinghouses. Trolley cars, tethered to electric lines overhead, scoot along faster than the automobiles, stopped in traffic. It has been a long time since Grace has found herself within a bustle of people. She asks a woman, waiting at a curb, how to find the jeweler she has come to see. The woman names a street and gives Grace directions.


  She turns where the woman indicated and, five doors up, encounters a sign that reads, JENSEN, JEWELER TO THE WORLD. How does a man become a jeweler to the world in a barely visible shop on a side street of a poor mill town? The sign must be more of a wish than a fact.

  The jeweler has white hair, poorly trimmed, yellow teeth, and wrinkles that might have been cut by the diamonds he sells.

  “How can I help you?” he asks.

  Grace opens her purse and lays the bracelet on the glass.

  “Oh yes, I remember this,” the jeweler says. “Mrs. Holland had it specially made for her. She’d seen it in a magazine, I think.”

  Before the man can ask how Grace came by it, she offers, “Merle Holland was my mother-in-law. Her son, Gene Holland, is my husband. I’m Grace Holland. Merle gave this bracelet to Gene to give to me, and now we’re in a bit of a fix because of the fire. We have two children, and our house burned down. I’m looking either to sell the bracelet back, or if it hasn’t been paid for, to give it back. I have the invoice.”

  Grace sets the bill beside the bracelet, dazzling in the lighting of the store.

  “Yes, that’s us,” the jeweler says. He turns the bill around. “But this is an appraisal. Mrs. Holland always paid for her jewelry with a check on the spot. One of my best customers, actually. So sad about her death.”