Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  One day Jamie took the ferry north to Port Angeles. From the railing, he watched the prow peel back the water to its white pith. What if he were to sign on to a ship, write to Marian and Wallace from China or Australia? Had his father felt the same sense of possibility? Or was it temptation? The temptation of becoming an absence. On a ship, he could do nothing to keep Marian from Barclay, nothing to stop Wallace from running up debts. On land, he couldn’t do much, either, but he was dogged by the obligation to try. At sea, perhaps his sense of obligation would stretch thin enough to snap.

  But, on the return journey, the wind was cold and the water choppy and dark, and he imagined being lost at sea somewhere far away, how Marian would never know what had happened. He couldn’t abandon her. True, she would likely abandon him one day soon, but he would rather endure that loss than inflict it.

  He tried several canneries, but there were no jobs. He tried a steelworks, a lumberyard, a produce market. Nothing. Every night he counted his dwindling money, saved from the sales of his watercolors and stolen, just a little bit, from Marian. Every night he calculated how much longer he could stay.

  * * *

  —

  After ten days of gloomy skies, one Saturday dawned clear and fine. Out the circle he’d rubbed clean in his little window, Mount Rainier’s gigantic, snowy crown hovered in the blue.

  Such a day seemed too precious to spend begging in vain for work, so he took the few cents he usually would have paid for a day’s food and spent it on a streetcar up to Woodland Park, where there were amusements. He meandered by a Ferris wheel, a small zoo, a row of carnival games. Under a tree, he reclined in the grass and watched people enjoy themselves. Not everyone had lost everything. Not everyone spent their days hoping to cram sardines into cans. Some carefree people still dawdled and laughed in the sunshine, and rather than resenting them, he was pleased to know such lives were possible.

  Presently a man set up two chairs and a little easel near the entrance to the zoo. He bought a balloon from a passing vendor and tied it to his easel, pinned up a sign that said caricatures 25 cents. Within minutes, a young father approached with his little girl, who sat squirming in the chair until the artist, with a flourish, presented her with his drawing. The father handed over a coin. Over an hour, the man sold three more portraits. A dollar! Jamie walked casually behind the artist’s easel when the next customer came. The subject’s face was recognizable but exaggerated, with giant eyes and a wild grin.

  That same day, with almost the last of his money, Jamie bought a large pad of thick drawing paper and a box of charcoal pencils. A necessary gamble. For chairs he scavenged two apple crates. That night he recruited a few fellow boarders as models for his samples, and the next morning he went back to Woodland Park. He chose a spot beside Green Lake, far from the amusements so as not to impinge on the other artist’s territory. He weighted down his samples with rocks and propped a piece of cardboard against his crate on which he’d written PORTRAITS in big letters, embellished with sketched figures out for a day in the park: a mother pushing a baby buggy, children with balloons, a hatted man strolling, some leafy trees, a family of ducks. He hadn’t drawn many portraits before, but he thought he could do well enough.

  Before long: his first customer, his first quarter.

  Some sunny weekend days he made four or five dollars. Some gray days, he didn’t make anything. He experimented with different locations, different parks: Playland and the swimming beach on Lake Washington and Alki Beach on Puget Sound, where there were saltwater pools. When it drizzled, he sheltered near the Pike Place Market. In lulls, he drew general scenes—bathers lounging, children on a carousel, fruit peddlers at the market—and tried to sell those.

  Jamie found he liked how the people he drew gave him permission to look closely and without hurry at their faces. He liked how people became vulnerable when they were about to be drawn, revealed more than they intended with their little adjustments. They sat up straighter or slouched, met his eye or evaded it. They seemed to become more themselves under his scrutiny, to radiate their most essential qualities. His special talent, he discovered, lay in his ability not only to see his subjects accurately but also to intuit how they wanted to be seen and to draw the overlap. His portraits were less flattering to the face than to the soul.

  People seemed pleased.

  One fine afternoon in July, as he waited beside Green Lake in Woodland Park, a group of three girls about his age sauntered by. All wore summer dresses and hats and ankle-strap pumps and radiated prosperity. A blonde led the way, plump and busty, striding forward with the confidence of someone who assumed she would be followed. The other two trailed after, both dark, one quite short and one quite tall. The short one was talking a blue streak and at the same time gnawing on a stick of rock candy. The tall one moved her long limbs tentatively, sliding along as though on ice she didn’t quite trust. She nearly stopped Jamie’s heart, that tall girl. She was leaning to one side, bending her ear toward her short, candy-eating companion. Her long, lowered eyelashes gave her a serene, enigmatic look.

  The three glided on, a little flotilla of elegance, passing through the crowd, the park, the hard times as though none of it were of any consequence. Jamie watched the tall girl’s retreating back with the bereft feeling of having dropped something precious and irreplaceable into a deep lake.

  “Hey, kid,” somebody said. “How much to draw my girl?”

  Jamie turned, startled. A sturdy young man hitched his thumb at a sour-faced young woman, her arms folded across her chest.

  “A quarter.”

  The man’s face tensed, then sagged. “Nah, she don’t need it that much.”

  “Actually,” Jamie said, “I could use the practice. Call it a nickel.” Really what he could use was the nickel.

  “Deal,” the man said, tough and smug again. He fumbled in his pocket, tossed a coin to Jamie. “First price is never real,” he told his girlfriend.

  “Business not exactly booming?” she asked as she sat down.

  He smiled. “At least I’m outside on a nice day.”

  “Yeah.” She seemed unconvinced. About her boyfriend, she said, “I thought he was taking me to Playland, but he’s too cheap.”

  Jamie would have to be careful not to let his instinctive dislike for these people and his sorrow over the lost tall girl creep into his drawing. In fact, he resolved to make an especially good portrait, to think of nothing but the face in front of him until he got the best version of this unpleasant girl down on paper.

  With his pencils, he turned the corners of her mouth up ever so slightly, made her uneven eyes almost but not quite the same size (make someone too perfect, and the likeness becomes a critique), left out the faint pockmarks on her cheeks. What he wanted to capture was a certain brassiness that showed through her sourness in glimpses, maybe a hint of humor.

  He was well into his work when the three girls came strolling back in the opposite direction. His eyes darted away too many times, and his subject turned to look.

  “If you don’t mind holding still,” he said, but her movement had already attracted the girls’ attention. They halted, looking at him, whispering.

  “Oh, I see,” his subject said. She gave him a big, saucy wink, though he saw something wounded and scornful underneath it. She beckoned to the girls. “You’re distracting my artist,” she called. “Come over here.”

  The blonde, the leader, pursed her lips in a why-not way and ambled in their direction, the other two in her wake. The short one, her rock candy worn down to its last nubs, circled behind Jamie and looked over his shoulder. To his model, she said, “It’s good. You’ll like it.” She put the wooden candy stick sideways in her mouth and crunched.

  “I doubt it,” said the sour girl. “I never like pictures of myself.”

  “How much longer?” said her boyfriend.

  “Only a mi
nute,” said Jamie.

  The blond girl came around to look. “We should get ours done,” she said in a general way. The tall girl, Jamie’s girl, hung back.

  “Almost finished,” Jamie said. Finally he tore the page from his pad and handed it to his subject.

  She brightened. “That’s not half bad.”

  Her boyfriend leaned over her shoulder. “Hey, he made you look really nice.”

  “How much are they?” the rock candy girl asked Jamie.

  “A quarter,” said the guy as his girlfriend stood and replaced her hat.

  “My treat, girls,” the blond girl said. To Jamie, she directed, “Start with Sarah.” She pointed at the tall girl.

  So he started with Sarah.

  * * *

  —

  Sarah Fahey, he learned soon enough, was the youngest of five children, one boy and four girls, though the girls with her in the park were her friends, not sisters. She lived on Millionaire’s Row near Volunteer Park, in her family’s large house that looked to Jamie like something out of a storybook with its timbers and herringbone brick and abundance of chimneys. An expansive, luminously green lawn was trimmed as close as baize. The house even had a name: Hereford House. Jamie had not known that houses could have names. Nor did he know, at first, that Hereford was a variety of cattle.

  Sarah’s brother had gone away to Harvard and was still in Boston even though he’d graduated. Everyone assumed he would come back to work for their father, though Sarah said she suspected he didn’t want to. Her eldest sister was married and lived nearby with her husband and baby. The next sister was studying art history at the University of Washington and lived at home but was away for the summer in Europe, and the sister after that, Alice, would start UW in the fall. “Mother’s big on education,” Sarah said. She herself had one more year at a private girls’ school.

  Sarah’s mother was tall and willowy and had a languid grace that Jamie supposed would one day be the final form of Sarah’s gawkiness. She had been a suffragist and then devoted herself to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. After the passage of Volstead, however, she had not protested when her husband filled their cellar with a robust stockpile of wine and liquor that, more than ten years on, was diminished but far from exhausted. It was mostly the drinking done by other people’s husbands that Mrs. Fahey had objected to, and, anyway, trying to oppose the decisions of Mr. Fahey tended to be a futile provocation that improved the happiness of no one.

  But first, that warm July day when she was still a stranger, Jamie drew Sarah’s portrait. Her friends fell all over themselves when he was done. “It’s you, Sarah,” said the rock-candy eater, whose name turned out to be Hazel. “It’s your absolute essence. The Madonna of Woodland Park.”

  “It’s almost spooky,” the blonde, Gloria, said. She looked sharply, almost accusingly, at Jamie. “How’d you do that?”

  “I had a good model,” Jamie said, blushing furiously.

  “Oh, did you?” said Gloria.

  So thrilling was the experience of sitting and looking at Sarah that he hadn’t wanted to finish the drawing. Sarah hadn’t said much while she sat, though from time to time she’d responded to her friends’ banter. When he handed her the torn-off page, she’d held it in her lap, regarding it with frank interest. “You’re talented,” she said. Her gaze was direct, her voice lower than he’d expected and more authoritative. He’d taken her quietness for shyness—a silly assumption, given that he, too, was quiet but not shy. He wished he could amend the drawing, which suddenly seemed sentimental and idealized. Hazel had chosen the right word: Madonna. Docile, venerated.

  “It’s not quite right,” he said.

  “It might be a little too kind. But it’s very good.”

  His blush deepened with dismal regret. He had wanted her to find the portrait uncanny, to think him astute.

  “Sarah’s father collects art,” Hazel put in, “so she’s well informed. And one of her sisters is studying art at UW—”

  “Art history,” Sarah corrected.

  “—and, also, what you should know about our Sarah is that she never gives empty praise. Sometimes you can feel almost neglected. But then when she tells you something nice, you can take it as unvarnished honesty.”

  Sarah said, “Why would anyone want empty praise?”

  “Because it’s pleasant!” said Hazel.

  The other two were anxious to have their turn under Jamie’s magic pencils, and though they exclaimed with pleasure and admiration over the finished products, Sarah’s was his best effort by far. “You should sign them for us,” Gloria said. “So when you’re famous we’ll be able to prove we own early works. And so Sarah knows your name.”

  He obliged, blushing again.

  “Jamie Graves,” read Gloria. “Are you often in this spot? If our other friends are jealous and demand portraits of their own?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. Then, with a little burst of hope, though he had planned to try Playland the next day: “I’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Hazel pumped his hand goodbye. “Very nice to meet you,” she said. The other two followed suit. He wanted to cling to Sarah’s cool, slender hand forever.

  Only after they were gone did he realize they hadn’t paid.

  What a despondent night he spent lying awake on the lumpy mattress in his cheerless cell, listening to his fellow boarders growing raucous downstairs. At some point there would be a fight, he knew, and the landlady, in her nightgown and brandishing a fire iron, would break it up, and only after that, sometime around sunrise, would there be quiet. He would never see Sarah again because theirs were not the kind of lives that would intersect, and though that was far worse than being shorted seventy-five cents, a little money would have been some consolation. Even though the park was still busy, he’d packed up, humiliated and furious with himself. If only he were the kind of boy who could have asked Sarah to ride the Ferris wheel with him or take a stroll along the water. Had the girls deliberately skipped out? Had they gone off and laughed at him, tossing their portraits into the nearest trash can? Even if he’d remembered the money in time, he wasn’t sure he would have had the nerve to ask for it or the will to lower himself.

  As the rowdiness downstairs built to a garbled crescendo, he decided he would go to Union Station at first light. He had enough money for a ticket home. He didn’t have the heart to hop another freight train. The spirit of adventure had left him. He’d proved nothing but his own haplessness.

  Earlier than usual, his landlady entered the fray, and it was still dark when quiet fell. Jamie slid irresistibly into sleep. When he woke, the day was bright and blue again. Mount Rainier’s summit gleamed above the horizon. Perhaps, he thought, he should go back to Woodland Park, as he had told the girls he would. Perhaps they would have realized their mistake. He could always catch a train later, that very night even.

  He stopped at a bright and expensive bakery he’d always eyed but never entered and bought a glossy chocolate pastry on his way to the streetcar. If this was to be his last day, he might as well enjoy himself. In the park, his first customer was a mother with twins, a boy and a girl, age five. The children sat very still, stern as two miniature titans of industry. He considered telling the mother he had a twin sister but decided he didn’t have the heart for the inevitable follow-up questions. Were they dear friends? They used to be. Weren’t they exceptionally close, though? He hadn’t written home once. He had no idea what Marian was doing, what dark bargains she had struck with Barclay Macqueen.

  After several hours, just when he was about to give up on Seattle entirely, when he had almost started to relish the idea of a long, self-pitying rail journey, Sarah Fahey came hurrying along the path beside the lake. “I am so, so, so sorry we didn’t pay,” she said, breathless. “Gloria sometimes forgets the offers she makes, and we were all so in love with our own images that we coul
dn’t think of anything else. We didn’t realize until later, and we were absolutely horrified. Here.” She held out a folded dollar bill.

  He hesitated. “I don’t want to take it.”

  “Why not? Of course you have to take it.”

  “But I’d like to ask you to take a walk with me, and if you’ve just given me a dollar, you might feel strange about it.”

  She lowered her arm a little. “A walk?”

  “Just along the lake. If we have nothing to say, you can turn back.”

  * * *

  —

  They walked up the shore of Green Lake, falling into a comfortable stride. She asked how old he was. She was three months older, already seventeen. He asked how she knew Gloria and Hazel, and she said she’d always known them. Their mothers had been friends first. “Don’t you have friends like that?” she asked. “Ones you played with when you were in diapers?”

  “Maybe you’d count my friend Caleb, though I doubt he ever wore diapers. He lives nearby, and we just sort of came across each other, him and me and my sister. His mother didn’t know my mother. I didn’t even know my mother.”

  “What do you mean? What happened to her? Oh.” She stopped, appalled, covering her mouth with a hand. “I’m sorry. I am so horribly nosy. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

  “No, it’s all right.” He tried, as best he could, to explain his family. He wasn’t accustomed to talking about himself, but when he tried to skip ahead or gloss over details, she interrupted, prompted him to expand. He realized, as he talked, how little he’d said to anyone since he’d left Missoula. In a new city, anonymity fostered silence.