Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “Emily, are you feeling all right?” she interrupted a story about a neighbor to ask me one Friday as I sat absentmindedly fondling the kitten and not really listening.

  “Of course I feel all right. Why? Don’t I look all right?”

  “You look all right, but you don’t act all right. You’re, well, distant somehow.”

  My attention suddenly sharpened. If she ever got it into her head there was something wrong with me, she would never stop until she found out what it was. At all costs I must convince her that everything was fine.

  “Are you getting along with Gideon?” she persisted.

  “Why yes, we are getting along better than ever.”

  “I asked him about you not long ago, and he said that you didn’t put in much time anymore on parish work, but that you seemed happy enough, in fact more content than he had ever known you. I don’t know why I’m worried except that you don’t seem yourself somehow. You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  Thank heavens Gideon had not seen fit to discuss that part of his marriage with her. “No, Mother, I’m not pregnant."

  “Isn’t it time you were?”

  “I suppose that God will take care of that in His own time,” I answered indifferently. Unlike most other women I knew, I seemed to have no maternal instinct, and children simply made me nervous.

  “Well, there’s something wrong,” she insisted shrewdly. “It’s not like you to go mooning about all the time with your head in the clouds. You haven’t fallen in love with another man, have you?”

  “Mother!” I really was shocked. It was one thing for Gideon to go wandering, but nice women didn’t even entertain such notions. “I’m ashamed of you that you could even suggest I would do something so wicked.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” she said tartly, “but on second thought I don’t suppose you are capable of it at that.”

  Widowhood certainly had changed her, I thought, and not for the better, either. “I think perhaps I’d best be going,” I said stiffly. “I still have some material to match at Bloom’s.”

  “Don’t run off angry,” she protested mildly but made no real move to keep me. Thank heavens she hadn’t come to live with us!

  I turned my attention then fully on where I was going to get more medicine, and I thought about how I might go to Boston without Gideon’s knowing. Obviously I couldn’t go while he was at home without endless awkward questions. The thing to do, then, was to wait until he went to Boston for one of his five-day visits and go myself on the third day when he would surely be back with his mistress in Evanston or elsewhere. Thank the Lord I hadn’t interfered in his affairs, for I thought I could go and return on the train in one day with no one the wiser.

  By the third day after he left, the last drop was gone. My eyes were watering and my nose running as if I had a cold, and I felt nauseated all the time. The train trip was torture. Icy beads of perspiration popped out on my brow, and I was constantly afraid I might vomit. My hands trembled and I could feel a tic that fluttered one eyelid with maddening persistence. Other people in the day coach eyed me curiously, but fortunately no one got up the nerve to ask me if something was wrong.

  When the train finally reached Charlestown, I staggered off and inquired the way to the nearest pharmacy. I suppose I must have looked at death’s door, because the second person I asked, a large woman in a voluminous green bombazine dress, solicitously took my arm and personally guided my steps to the dispenser of my succor.

  “Tell the man what’s the matter, dearie,” she said as we faced the pharmacist, who was looking a little alarmed.

  “It’s —” I bit my lip. Such a thing as I was about to tell him I had was not mentioned in polite society.

  “Is it your monthlies, dearie?” the large woman filled in helpfully.

  I nodded, and burst into tears.

  “There, there,” she soothed. “What’ve you got for her?” she asked the pharmacist, a willowy young man with spectacles and a prematurely bald head.

  “Please,” I broke in, having already spotted the bottle I sought even among the several hundred others crowding his shelves, “that elixir there has always helped me wonderfully. I didn’t expect I’d need it until next week …” I started helplessly to cry again.

  “You heard her,” the large lady snapped. “Get it down!”

  He looked startled. “I didn’t even know we still had a bottle of it!” he exclaimed. “Dr. Wiseman told us that stuff is so strong that anyone needing it ought to be in the hospital instead.”

  “Well, you can see for yourself she’s in a bad enough way to be in a hospital, now can’t you?” The large lady was becoming increasingly exasperated. “Do you want her fainting on you? Get a move on, man. She passes out and you can take her to the hospital yourself.”

  At that the bald young man hastily got down the bottle and I actually snatched it from his hand, broke the wax seal with a practiced thumbnail, and tipped it up to my mouth. Within a few minutes I began to feel a blessed relief. The nausea disappeared, I stopped trembling, and I began to feel as if I had blood rather than icewater in my veins.

  “Well, I’ll be,” the large lady said, surprised. “I’ve never seen the like. Looks right as rain now, don’t she? Say, what is that stuff? I think I’ll get a bottle myself. My daughter Sarey has an awful time with her monthlies, she does.”

  The large lady invited me to her house to lie down for a bit, but I told her I had to catch the ferry to Boston to meet my husband, or he would be terribly worried. She saw me off on the ferry boat and stood for a long time on the dock waving her handkerchief. I heaved a sigh of relief, for had she too been going to Boston, she would have been impossible to get rid of. As it was, she had evinced more than a token curiosity about the empty valise I was carrying. I told her it was for my husband’s soiled clothes, and though she looked doubtful, there was no way she could question me further without calling me a liar.

  On the Boston side I took a horse-drawn tramcar into the center of town, marking in my mind the couple of pharmacies we passed. On the way back, I would stop at them as well. I got off at Tremont and Park, bought one bottle, and walked over to Mount Vernon, where I got another, then along the Common to School Street and up to Dock Square, where I could see a forest of masts along the waterfront near the Long Wharf. It was then that I saw Gideon, his red hair flaming in the bright spring sunlight. He was walking along as if he were three feet off the ground, a silly smile on his face.

  Hurriedly, I dodged behind a wagon, and after he had passed I followed him. He swung along at a good clip, and I had trouble keeping up with him. We had come back to the Common when he entered a small nondescript stone building half a block away. A discreet metal plaque beside the door announced that this was the Tilbury Memorial Ship Library, a branch of the Boston Subscription Library. This must be the place he was always making such a fuss about. I almost didn’t bother going in, but it occurred to me that perhaps he was planning to meet someone there. I opened the door into a kind of anteroom hung with ship pictures and lined with half a dozen wooden pedestals on which reposed the kind of half-models of ships that shipyards used as guides to build by. I put my head cautiously entirely around the doorway.

  The room was quite large but looked much smaller lined as it was with shelves full of books and papers. To the left was a desk in front of which Gideon was standing talking to a young lady who was obviously the librarian. There was no one else in the room. Well, so much for that. I was about to pull my head back and go about my business while I knew that he was safely occupied when I saw him lift his hand and run a finger lightly down her cheek. His back was to me so that I could not see his expression, but on her face there came a look of such tenderness and love that I felt shaken to the quick. She took his hand in both of hers and kissed it, all the while staring radiantly up into his face. Then she laughed gaily and said something as she started to rise.

  I quickly withdrew my head and tiptoed across the anteroom
and out onto the street, where I realized that I was trembling like a leaf. I suddenly saw the city for a moment with their eyes, bathed in golden spring light, a place for lovers. I couldn’t think why I felt so wrenched inside. I was fond enough of Gideon at times and certainly had no intention of giving him up, but even at the picnic I had never come close to feeling the way that girl’s face looked. Or had I? A vision of the Archangel Michael flicked across my mind’s eye. Yet somehow it wasn’t the same. For the first time since the episode of the glass darning egg, I felt cheated, left out. I sat down on a bench at the Common, took a surreptitious drink from the already open bottle, and settled down to wait.

  I didn’t have long to curb my impatience, for I could soon see the two of them come down the steps arm in arm, he with a basket hooked over his bad arm. I stood behind a tree until they had passed, and watched them lay out their picnic on the grass in the shade of some flowering bushes. I found that I could come quite close, for they never took their eyes from each other, and on Gideon’s face was a radiance that matched hers. He needed only a fiery sword to be Michael himself.

  She was a pretty girl with gold-streaked brown hair almost the color of mine, but it was very fine, and she had it pinned up carelessly so that tendrils escaped and fluttered about her ears and neck, giving her a windblown look. While my eyes were round and brown, hers were slitted as if with laughter and as blue as Gideon’s. While my mouth and jaw were heavy, her lips were thin with a little quirk to them, and she had a small chin and small even white teeth. I could tell from her merry smile and Gideon’s delighted laughter that they were teasing each other, and I hated both of them. Then Gideon said something and they both stopped laughing and suddenly had a look of such naked want on their faces that I had to turn my eyes away, my heart pounding unpleasantly in my breast.

  I left them to their picnic and made my way back to the library, which, surprisingly, I found to be open. Inside at the desk where she had been sitting I saw a painfully thin young man with white, translucent skin, a high forehead, and very blond hair neatly parted in the middle. He lifted gray eyes to mine with a sweet smile and asked if he could help me.

  “Oh,” I said, as if hesitant, “I don’t know. There was a young lady here before …”

  “You must mean Elisabeth Bowman. Was Mrs. Bowman doing a project for you?”

  “Well, no — or rather, for my husband. My goodness, I didn’t think she would be a Mrs., she had no ring.”

  His voice went flat with a hint of unfriendliness. “Mrs. Bowman is a widow.” I could tell he didn’t think it was any of my business.

  “Never mind,” I said hastily. “I’ll catch her at another time. It’s nothing very important”

  “Perhaps I could help you?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. She knows all about it, you see. But thank you very much, Mr. —”

  “Greene. Malcolm Greene. At your service, madame. Would you like to leave a note?”

  “No, I won’t trouble you. Will she be in later this afternoon? I could perhaps see her then.”

  “I’m afraid she won’t be in until tomorrow morning. She is my part-time assistant and only works mornings.”

  “Oh. Well, perhaps tomorrow then.”

  I went to where the horsecar would return me to the Charlestown Ferry. It took me a long time, because I made three stops at pharmacies and had to wait for the next tram each time. During the ferry and train ride back to Evanston, I had plenty of time to think what I must do. I was taking a chance that Malcolm Greene would describe me in front of Gideon, but even if he did, I rather doubted that my husband would ever connect the woman with brown eyes and brown hair with his wife, who for all he knew was safely at home in Evanston.

  Now that I had done it, I realized that I could indeed go to Boston when Gideon was at the shipyard. He always left for work at daybreak, which came early now, and didn’t return until dark, also late. I would take the train that came through Evanston an hour before the one I had taken today and be back long before he came in to dinner. It was only gradually that I allowed myself to think that I wouldn’t be going only to get more medicine, but rather that I would also be going to see Elisabeth Bowman.

  But what if that angered him enough to leave me? a voice inside my head argued. And what if she, after she had heard what I had to say, decided to force him to choose? I had seen his face when he looked at her, and I knew what he would choose, would have to choose. My common sense, for that was what the voice was, told me to leave it alone, that he or she or both of them would one day tire of the lying and the subterfuge, but my rage would not let me be. Once again I had been given the glass darning egg in place of the pretty snow scene, only this time I could do something about it. I picked up the glass snow scene with the elves that he had given me when he brought me first to see the house, and I threw it as hard as I could at the fireplace, where it smashed satisfyingly into a million pieces that shimmered in the firelight as they sprayed across the burning wood. That night I took the medicine until I was nearly unconscious, but the vision would not come.

  As it turned out, it was nearly three months before I got up my courage actually to do it. A dozen times I went to the train station, and a dozen times I let the train pull out without me. I had meanwhile gone through a frightening number of elixir bottles, and it was this that drove me at last to take the train and then the Charlestown Ferry. This time I stopped at the pharmacies on my way in to kill time and to put off the moment of no return. Of them all, only one remembered me, but put up no argument about selling me another bottle. At last I came to the Common and walked the half-block to the Tilbury Memorial Ship Library.

  When I entered, I found only the young man, Malcolm Greene. I was more relieved than anything else at this unexpected reprieve.

  “Oh dear,” he said, recognizing me immediately, “She’s off today; she’s been quite sick. Why don’t I give you her home address, and you can make a definite appointment with her. If you hurry, you might just catch her. She said she might go out sailing this afternoon, though I told her she was mad to try it.”

  “That would be very kind of you.” Inwardly I was seething. That she sailed put the cap on it, for of all my memories of Gideon, perhaps the most satisfying was of the day during our honeymoon when he took me sailing, and now I could imagine only too well the two of them with the wind in their faces and the spray coming up over the bow as the boat cleaved through the dancing waves.

  “It’s 245 Spruce Street, a small house set back from the street. Spruce is a short street that crosses Mount Vernon just west of Louisburg Square. If you can’t find it, ask at the square and someone will point it out to you.”

  I already knew what the house would look like. It would be a replica of the house I had dreamed of having before I was forced to settle for that gross pile of stone I called home. “I’m sure I can find it. Thank you very much, Mr. Greene.”

  I decorously shook hands with him, leaving my gloves on, and with little trouble made my way to 245 Spruce Street, which was in truth the house I had wanted, only not so well manicured. A bush of white climbing roses sprawled untidily up over the side of the house, and the grass badly needed cutting. She should be paying more attention to her garden instead of going sailing on her days off, I thought A line was attached to a bell that, though it was quite a bit larger, reminded me for some reason of the tinkling bell at Mr. Sneed’s pharmacy. The door opened and there she stood, looking mildly inquiring. It was the first and only time I ever saw her close up, and I realized with a start that she was every bit as old as I, perhaps even Gideon’s age, though he was only two years older. It was difficult to think of him as being only twenty-eight. What startled me even more was that she was dressed outlandishly in men’s sailor britches with a middy blouse like the one I had worn on my honeymoon.

  She sensed my dismay, and smiled ruefully. “I know I’m hardly dressed for receiving, but I was going sailing, you see, and it’s simply impossible to move quickly in skirt
s. How may I help you?”

  I looked at her unflinchingly. “I am Mrs. Gideon Hand.”

  Her face went still, and it was as if a lamp had been extinguished. “Oh. Then I needn’t ask how I can help you, need I? Please come in. The water’s still hot; I’ll make you some tea.”

  While she was making the tea and probably pulling herself together, I sat down in the parlor and looked around me. It was a hodgepodge of dissimilar items and furniture all thrown together anyhow. There was a ship’s wheel on the wall, a large stuffed seagull (a seagull!), several prints of sailing ships, a pile of polished rocks on a dusty sideboard, shells of all sizes scattered about everywhere, a large overstuffed chair, and a chess set with a game apparently in progress on a low table in front of a rather worn blue sofa. The fireplace and irons needed polishing, and the carpet, once a royal blue, was worn in patches nearly to gray. In the window sat an orange kitten with topaz eyes that regarded me coolly.

  She came in with the teatray, and I have to hand it to her, if she was nervous she certainly didn’t show it. With steady hands she poured the tea into two unmatched cups and asked me if I wanted milk, lemon, or sugar. We both sat on the sofa measuring each other over the teacups.

  “Well?” she asked at last. “I assume you have a purpose in coming here beyond finding out what I look like.”

  “I want you to let Gideon go.”

  “I’m not sure he wants to be let go, as you put it. Have you discussed this with him?” She was a brazen one, all right.

  “No, and I don’t intend to. I am appealing to your sense of fairness and honesty.”

  Her face softened. “I would have let him go in time, you know. It would have been all right, only we came to mean too much to each other to have it go on like this. I’m sorry you had to find out. Now there’ll be three of us hurt instead of only two.”

  “What has he told you about me?” I asked suspiciously.