These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  He had temporarily relieved her of her motherhood, but if the act had been malicious she could not imagine it. It occurred to her for the first time that he had taken the boys not so much deliberately away from her, but to gather them to himself. Because he wanted to be with them, show them a time. Be one of them. Because he could.

  From the beginning he had been an eager father.

  She’d envied that, never felt herself to be a very natural parent. When she told Victor she was pregnant the first time, she’d burst into tears. He took her hand, puzzled, while trying to suppress his own excitement.

  “We’ll get a good midwife, Iz. Or we could get a doctor. You can even have the baby in the hospital if you like.”

  “It’s not that part I’m frightened of.”

  “What, then?”

  “What if… Oh, what if it’s born blind, or doesn’t like me? What if I can’t make it happy?”

  He looked at his wife. He’d heard pregnant women were sometimes unpredictable. “Oh, Iz. It’s a baby. Our baby. It’ll be fine. It’ll love you. Look, I love you, and I’m a lot smarter than some baby.”

  When she stepped on his foot he made kicked-dog yelps and hobbled to the icebox. Hopping back and apologizing there was no ice cream to go with it, he handed her a pickle. As she bit in, pale juice squirted over his collar.

  He touched the tiny swell at her belly, wonderment in his voice. “Oh, Mrs. Howard, what have we here?”

  When Henry was born Victor rooted himself outside their bedroom door for the duration of her labour, rocking in place with his eyes squeezed shut against his own helplessness. Each time she fell quiet between gritty moans he was sure she had died. And when it started up again he felt rushes of relief and a terrible pity, wishing only that he could absorb his wife’s pain. Toward the end her cries were drawn with agony, and when those cries began Victor moaned along with the awful sound and pressed his forehead into the doorframe, so that for weeks afterward he had a strange, ridged bruise running from his temple to his eyebrow.

  When she produced a last, garbled scream, he tried to barge in, but the midwife had locked the door against him.

  Later, when he was finally let in, he was astonished to see Isobel smiling weakly and trying to button together a clean nightgown. He nearly folded in relief, catching himself with a hand on the bedstead. The midwife quickly covered the basin she was carrying and bustled out the door.

  “Don’t you touch that baby. I’ll be back in a minute with more cloths.”

  He ignored her and scooped up the naked infant, still streaked with slime, and held it up to the window to examine.

  “Well, well, well. Will you look at that, Iz!”

  He leaned down to kiss his wife and laughed, nodding to the first-blush light coming in through the panes. “I had it all planned while I was waiting. I was going to call her Dawn, but you see here, she’s got all the wrong plumbing.”

  Isobel’s fingers thrummed the table. Yes, Victor had always been very at ease with the children.

  At the hour she looked up at the cuckoo forcing his head out of his tiny chalet and marveled, certain she had never had the luxury of sitting and listening to a clock tick. Late sun glinted off the taps over the scrubbed sink. She sat opposite Louisa across the polished table, a bowl of grapes between them, a dome of waxed cheesecloth to keep away flies.

  Louisa was a strangely reserved child, making only the softest impression with her presence. Isobel realized that her daughter was not, as she had suspected, overwhelmed by her boisterous brothers, nor was her spirit trodden in the chaos created by them. Alone with only Isobel, the girl seemed to take on a new dimension, quiet but happily, deliberately quiet, an observant child with an expansive inner life.

  Like an island, Isobel thought. Most all of her hidden.

  After they had settled into the quiet rhythms of just the two of them in the house, Isobel tried to draw the girl out in conversation — doing nearly all of the talking herself while Louisa nodded, polite but stubbornly mute, her fringe of wheat-coloured bangs rising and falling over blue-grey eyes.

  She told the girl a bit about her own childhood, about growing up above the bakery, before it was a tailor shop, back when it had been her father’s business and her family lived upstairs. She described her room above the ovens, deliciously warm in winter but unbearable in July. How the smell of yeast and rising dough was so pervasive it insinuated itself into her clothing and hair, so that schoolmates would sometimes tease, calling her Isobread.

  She said little of her own mother. She found herself hoping that when Louisa was grown, with children of her own, her remembrances of her first family might be fond.

  She tried to explain the loneliness of growing up as she did, as an only child. She was glad Louisa had brothers to play with. “You see, that way no one is left alone.”

  Louisa, pointed chin shelved on a palm, looked at her mother and with her chewed nails tapped a tattoo over the freckles on her cheek.

  “But I am alone.”

  Isobel frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m alone. Even when they’re here. Isn’t that why I’m staying home and they’re all out on the island? ’Cuz the boys are just like Papa, and I’m just like you.”

  She was smiling as she declared it so.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ~ ~ ~

  On Saturday Isobel walked to the tailor shop. Victor’s sign on the door, Sorry, closed till September, was crooked. She removed it and hung the sign Louisa had fashioned the night before. The girl had worked so hard bent over her pasteboard, the tip of her tongue anchored sideways, that Isobel couldn’t bring herself to point out the misspelling. Open Mournings, Eight Till Noon. She took another sign from her basket, this one she had made herself with a laundry marker on parchment in a hurried longhand. Millinery. She spread the sign across the window under Victor’s gold and black letters and taped it into place. If the summer went well, perhaps in the autumn she would hire a sign painter to permanently assign the word in gilded paint.

  The tools and most of the materials she needed were here, squirreled away in drawers and cupboards around the shop. She spread boxes on the worktable. One held the feathers, and those she separated by colour and species. Since her sons had been old enough to leave the yard, Isobel had offered a bounty for each perfect feather brought home. Henry and Thomas scoured the woods and searched the riverbanks for abandoned nests, and their prizes emerged from skins of tissue paper in subdued hues — pheasant, grouse, and guinea hen, waxwing and partridge. A more colourful selection lay beneath — carnival splashes of jay, scarlet tanager, blue bunting, yellow finch, and oriole. Exotic feathers and whole, preserved wings ordered from catalogs had arrived in vellum packets tagged with the Latin names — Ortalis vetula, Anser cygnoides, Paroaria, Estrilda. One caught Isobel’s eye, Gracula religiosa, and she smiled at the name, thinking it rather showy for the simple mynah bird.

  She picked up an oil-black feather with a brilliant red slash, running the edge of the feather over the back of her hand. More waxed boxes read Duck: All Kinds.

  After arranging the feathers and relabeling the drawer tabs, Isobel went through a basket of magazines, copies of Vogue and Harper’s, and the fashion pages torn from previous weeks of the Minneapolis Tribune.

  She’d planned this moment many times in her head, but always with the knowledge it would be a far-off thing, a someday endeavor to be resumed when the children were in school or old enough to help run the house, or when Victor wasn’t so busy. Now, surrounded by these things once again, Isobel felt time dissolve, so that she was no less eager than on her first day in the Pasal Millinery, twenty years before.

  When was it? Last autumn Victor had made the glib comment about having a fourth child. Thomas had finally started school, and she was only just beginning to see her way clear. There would be no more babies if she could help it. It didn’t matter what she had promised so many years ago. She wasn’t filling an order. Victor had made promises
too. She clearly remembered his pointing to the sunny corner of the shop and saying, “That’s where you can do your hat business, Izzy, right there.”

  She dove into cupboards and found square bread tins containing ribbons and ribbon scraps, brilliant arrays of grosgrain, satin, and plaids, all tightly packed by widths, from a slivered eighth to five inches wide. She arranged the rolls by texture and colour — crimped, knotty, pleated, watery silk and heavy velvet. Tins were crammed with false flowers of velveteen. The last was heaviest, and she hoisted it to the worktable to begin sorting the brooches with broken clasps or missing rhinestones, mateless earrings, and beads of all varieties — glass, porcelain, clay, horn, ivory, and bone. All items were pawed through and tossed into sectioned trays.

  In an old flour bin she found lengths of tanned snakeskin and dyed leathers, scraps of alligator and bits of fur, dyed lengths of horsetail, suede and leather lashings, braided hemp. A stack of cigar boxes held pounded silver disks, pieces of antler, and several dozen perfect clusters of tiny pine cones.

  As she dragged an old spool case from the back room, Isobel vaguely wondered if Victor might guess what she was doing to fill her time.

  The boxes and drawers and trays fanned out on the vast worktable, their contents representing years of hoarding and waiting. She hadn’t seen many of the items for years, and she had to fight to keep from falling into a haze of reminiscence as she worked. Picking up a short length of pearl beading left over from the bodice of her wedding gown, she recalled Victor’s pledge: that it would be the one and only article of clothing he would ever make for her.

  Isobel clearly remembered those weeks of sewing, and Victor’s face as he was chided by superstitious friends about the consequences of making her gown. He’d been warned, “Seeing your bride’s dress is bad luck enough, but making it? Vic, you’re asking for disaster.”

  Victor hardly looked up from the lengths of tawny voile spilling from his lap, snapping a thread with his grinning teeth.

  “Been courting disaster for months. Can’t hardly let her down now, can I?”

  Even Isobel thought his idea to make her dress was overly romantic, almost silly. But when she entered the church on her father’s arm and saw Victor waiting at the altar, the gown shifted minutely on her shoulders, and she suddenly experienced a stark comprehension, not only of his labours, but his intent. His allegiance to her stitched in silk, pronounced in the lace cuffs and repeated in rows of beadwork. Happiness hinted at in the hems teasing her ankles, his desire trailing in the folds and weight of the train.

  Monday she was at the shop early. She swept and scrubbed and polished until the odors of steamed wool, mothballs, and sewing machine oil were softened by Castile soap and lemon wax. By ten a.m. the combs had fallen from her hair and the braid coiled atop her head had slipped sideways nearly over an ear. Her face was streaked with sweat, and in her haste she had forgotten to bring an apron, so that her skirt had two filthy smudges where she had repeatedly wiped her hands on her hips. Her stockings were run from kneeling on the rough floor.

  She was moving a heavy suit form away from her corner, half lugging, half dancing it to the rear of the shop, when she began to sing a low, off-key song that rose in a crescendo as she wrestled her ungainly partner along the boards.

  Her singing voice could move Victor to hysteria. He would slap helplessly at his knees and shake his head, mute laughter hissing from his throat. Wiping his eyes after a round of “Old McDonald,” he would turn to the children. “Well, if there’s another war, we’ll always be safe. Who needs bombs when we have your mother’s voice?”

  Isobel was singing at the top of her lungs when a strange woman stepped into the shop, her silhouette framed darkly against a backdrop of bright haze and a passing swarm of mayflies. Isobel nearly dropped the suit form to the floor. It righted itself violently on its heavy iron stand, bouncing against Isobel’s chest and nearly knocking her down.

  Had she seen the woman somewhere before? She couldn’t be sure. Someone from the resorts or summer cabins? The stranger was stifling a laugh with the back of her hand. Isobel took the dummy by the shoulders as though to chastise it. It wobbled for a second, teetering on the uneven floorboards as if it might fall.

  Isobel attempted to straighten her braid with one hand, while wiping the other on her dirty skirt. She smiled in greeting. “Look at me! You’ll think I’m mad. Well, I’m not. Really, ask anyone. I’m Isobel.”

  She reached for the woman’s white-gloved hand. “Isobel Howard.”

  But instead of grasping the proffered hand Isobel merely touched the woman’s forefinger, pressing it in a tiny shake. “And as you can see, I’m quite filthy.”

  The woman clasped Isobel’s dirty hand and pumped it vigorously. “I’m Mrs. Liam Malley. And I am quite clean.”

  “Malley? Oh, you must be that Chicago woman!”

  When the words spilled out, Isobel’s hand flew to her mouth. Mrs. Malley’s own mouth twitched and she nodded somberly. “Yes, that’s me.”

  She looked dubiously around the shop.

  “I saw your sign.”

  The room was empty of hats of any kind. “You’re Cypress’s milliner?”

  Mrs. Malley was tall and wore her thick sable hair wrapped into a chignon. She was slight-shouldered and small-waisted, a slim pear. Her clothes, Isobel noted, were simple but well tailored from fine grades of fabric. She wore a thin, cap-sleeved blouse and a straight linen skirt nearly to her ankles. Her jewelry was modest, a gold fourleaf clover at her collar, a plain wedding band, freshwater pearls in her ears. Her hat was the only truly distinctive article about her, a demure mustard-coloured wedge with slim pheasant feathers trailing behind. A city hat, thought Isobel. Simple, elegant. The face beneath its brim was attractive — fetching, as Victor would say — with a thin nose, wide mouth, and very pale green eyes. Dark, arched brows made her appear slightly curious. Her regal neck made her seem taller than she actually was. Isobel tried not to stare.

  I could make hats for such a head.

  She invited the woman to sit down, apologizing for the mess in the shop and again for her own state. As she spoke, she put water to boil on the small gas burner near the irons. She took down two dusty cups and wiped them clean with a piece of muslin.

  “Welcome to Cypress, Mrs. Malley. I can offer you some tea, but there’s no milk, I’m afraid. And, honestly, I can’t really claim to be the milliner. Not yet, anyway. I confess I might have put the cart before the horse by pasting that sign up. Truth is, I haven’t worked for years, other than dressmaking. I’m just getting my things together again, but I don’t even have any current patterns… ”

  She eyed the woman’s hat, wondering how she might politely ask to examine its interior for clues to its construction.

  She was chattering on nervously but couldn’t stop. She realized she hadn’t spoken to an adult in over a week.

  “… so, you see, I’m sorry if you’ve come to buy a hat. I’m simply not ready. I don’t even have all my supplies yet. It will be a week, at least.”

  Mrs. Malley was still standing, had made no move to sit on the offered chair. She picked up the string of pearl beads from the worktable to examine them. When finally she looked up at Isobel, she seemed uncertain. “Have we met?”

  Isobel blinked. She was sure now they had not; she would not have forgotten those eyes. Mrs. Malley’s gaze was startling, the irises extreme in their colour of the silvery side of a leaf. But there was some reflection in her eye aside from the odd lightness which Isobel found unsettling. Distraction? Preoccupation? She had the sudden inexplicable thought that Mrs. Malley was struggling to place herself as she touched surfaces and scanned the room. She seemed to be taking an inventory, as if to fill a hollowed moment with detail, to anchor that moment and gain some foothold in it.

  When she spoke, the words seemed perfunctory and vaguely hollow. “Thank you for the offer of tea, Mrs. Howard, but I should really be getting home.”

  She handed Isob
el the beads and turned to the door. “I may stop by another time.”

  Isobel stepped forward. Perhaps they had met. “Wait.”

  The woman glanced back only for an instant. She smiled and said, “Thank you,” before slipping away into the glare of the street.

  So abrupt was Mrs. Malley’s odd visit that as she sat later, sipping tea at Victor’s cluttered desk, Isobel wondered if she’d imagined it. She drained her cup and went back to her tasks.

  ~ ~ ~

  Isobel shut her eyes against the glare of all the metal; too much. The rails of her bed, the towel dispenser, the frame of the wheelchair, each offered warped miniatures of the room.

  She clawed backward, trying once again to recall that first meeting, to ferret up some ancient detail, trying to identify anything special, anything that might have portended such a bitter end. How ironic that her first encounter with Cathryn was so mundane she couldn’t dredge up anything other than having thought the woman a little distracted and slightly familiar.

  Isn’t that just how it happens. A person need only walk over your threshold and your life can become forever changed, lived under a different sky.

  ~ ~ ~

  She laid the pearl beads from her wedding dress away. Fate always seemed to come traipsing through one door or another. When she met Victor, she’d just finished her apprenticeship at the millinery in Duluth and was working at her first paid position. He had come in to pick up a bolt of soleil and loitered at the counter for a full hour after the transaction. He had a charming, lopsided grin that veered left. He was lean, gap-toothed, and energetic, his hair already thinning. He joked and smiled at Isobel incessantly, straddling the limits of decency in an attempt to get her to giggle or blush, but she remained stubbornly composed and uncoloured and kept at her task of cutting a stack of felt rounds. She’d had to shoo him out the door at closing time.

  When she stepped out after locking up, she scanned the empty street with a disappointment that surprised her. He might have waited to walk her home, or even to tease her more. With her head down she walked toward her tram stop. Turning the corner, she nearly ran into the flower Victor held out, a paper iris fashioned from a scrap of butcher paper with a pipe-cleaner stem, its stamen a twisted Juicy Fruit wrapper. His grin was sheepish, suddenly shy. He nodded toward the darkened window of the flower shop across the street and shrugged.