Victor had promised to come but was a full hour late. Isobel made light of it. “Oh, probably gone down the wrong street or something.”
Carol poked her. “Sure it’s not a case of cold feet?”
Isobel laughed. “His feet are boiling. He just has trouble getting one in front of the other.”
Carol pulled a box from behind the divan. “Open this one quick. We didn’t want to give it to you in front of Victor.”
She took the package. “Another present?”
They all perched around her. “Well, don’t just sit there. Open it.”
“Thank you.”
“You thank us after you open it.”
Kathleen giggled.
The box was light. The wrapping fell away, and she inhaled when she saw the name of an expensive Minneapolis boutique embossed in the top.
“Ruthie picked it up for us last time she went to visit her brother. We all voted on the colours.”
She unfolded the layers of tissue to reveal a nightgown and robe set, featherweight grey-blue silk with jade straps and piping. She held it up over her dress.
“Oh. Oh… it’s just gorgeous.”
Ruthie turned to the other girls. “See, it does match her eyes. I was right.”
Isobel felt a sudden bond with these girls. Looking into their friendly, carefree faces, she suddenly wanted to go on being one of them.
When Victor finally did jab the doorbell the party was winding down and most of the food was gone. He was flushed and grinning, holding a wrapped bottle of blackmarket wine aloft in offering.
“Hello, battle-axes.”
Ruthie laughed and leaned over to Isobel, whispering, “Heck, he’s cute enough to wait for.”
Carol stood to offer her hand. “Natty suit.”
Kathleen tugged the elbow of Carol’s sleeve and said through her teeth, “He’s a tailor, goose.”
As Victor worked the cork out of the wine bottle, he looked around. “Glasses?”
Ellen whipped the tortoise frames from her nose and handed them blindly to Victor, who roared as he splashed a bit of wine onto the thick lenses.
Someone dashed to the kitchen to rinse tumblers. The girls gathered in a circle, and after Victor poured they all raised a toast to the future. Glasses met, arms forward to form the spokes of a human wheel.
There was a quiet throat-clearing from the far side of the room and the circle broke apart. Isobel was still sitting on the couch, arms crossed, surrounded by torn gift wrap and boxes.
“I suppose there’s a glass for me?”
They met the next day at the sandy shore stretching beyond the lighthouse. When Victor walked down the long expanse of beach, she’d had to run to catch up to him. He had rolled up his trousers, and his bare feet were white in the surf. He was looking out over the water. Isobel was breathless as she took his hand.
He turned. “Would you rather be on an ocean, you know, in a boat, or would you rather see it from shore?”
“Shore. No contest.”
“Why?”
“Uh, why?… Well, because. Because boats smell and they leak, and… because it’s so much prettier to look out to sea than to look from sea to land. Isn’t it?”
Victor shrugged. “Maybe.”
The wind had picked up and began pushing thunderheads in from the lake.
“Victor, what do you want?”
“I prefer a boat.”
“No, I mean now.”
“Now? A cigar would be nice.”
She gave him a look. “Vic, I mean with us.”
“Oh, you mean what do I want?”
Without dropping her hand he leaned to pick up a flat stone. “Well, I’ve had some time to think about that, Isobel.”
He skipped the stone out over the surface of the lake and counted its hobbles. “Six! Did you see that?”
He faced her. “I think that’s my record!”
She folded her arms until he went on.
“Okay, here it is. I want a wife who laughs at my jokes, but only the good ones. I want my children to have lots of brothers and sisters. I want a real house. In a town, not a city. I want someone to talk to about the things I’m interested in.”
In the months they’d been together this was his second display of sincerity. It suddenly occurred to Isobel that what she was embarking upon would last the rest of her life. Victor, for all his outward nonchalance, wasn’t going into the marriage lightly. He would rely on her, for all the reasons he had said and more.
She looked out over the water. It was unbroken, no far shore. An ocean, really.
Would she be able to give him what he wanted? She thought she was willing to try.
He picked up another stone and handed it to her. “And you?”
“Me? You mean what do I want?”
She fell silent. She honestly hadn’t thought about it, not beyond what kind of songs she wanted sung at the wedding, or what kinds of curtains she would hang. She threw her stone and they watched it dance, impossibly, six times. An omen? Victor hooted and scooped her up.
She laced her fingers behind his neck and they grew silent. A deepening settled between them in the time it might have taken for her stone to drift to the bottom of the lake.
He needed her. The tough, silly boy needed her. And he wanted to know what she needed in turn. She swallowed. “I want us to be together. To make all our decisions together, to talk about everything, like partners. To have children. We want the same things, Victor.”
He shook his head. “You saw it, right? It skipped six times.”
“I saw.”
Victor groaned and fell to his knees. “You’re heavier than you look, woman.”
They rolled to sit on the sand, plowing their fingers and toes through the sugary layers. They watched a freighter move under the bridge. Isobel swatted at sand flies and laughed after squashing one just over Victor’s ear. As she flicked it away he suddenly turned and kissed her.
“I love you.”
“You do?”
She almost turned away. “Yes, I do.”
He squinted, as if relieved to have finally said it. “Wanna know why?”
She nodded.
“You’re mouthy when you get angry. Lots of women just sulk or holler. You’re not too sweet and you’re not coy. Let’s see, what else? You told me once my bald spot was — what — adorable, I think you said. You see things the way they are, not just the way you want them to be. Oh, did I mention that you look real edible in that dress?”
She smacked his arm. Victor sprayed her leg with a palmful of sand. “Right. One more thing.”
He squeezed her hand and steered it toward the surf. “See those colours? There, just before the wave crests, where it’s blue and grey and green all in layers? The lake only looks like that before a storm.”
He touched the tender skin at her brow. “Your eyes are the same. You’re like that water. You don’t give away much, but it’s there all the same, just underneath.”
As their eyes locked Isobel felt a sudden falling in her throat. Looking away from him to see smoke from the freighter ribbon to meet low clouds, she smiled.
“I love you too, Victor.”
CHAPTER FIVE
~ ~ ~
Victor closed Beeks’s tailor shop, put the building up for sale, and crated up the best of the machinery and supplies. When the building sold, the cash would buy them a new start.
After the wedding Victor cheerfully moved Isobel back to Cypress. He had great hopes for the Iron Range. It was a growing region, loaded with potential for an independent merchant.
Following the red moving van full of the Beeks’s better furniture, they drove a hundred miles north. Once in town, they stored their belongings in the back of an old stable and took a room at the Welsh boardinghouse until they could find a place to live.
They poked their way through ten houses before Victor took her up the hill at the edge of town to look at a tall, butter-colored farmhouse with flaring porches and
a crumbling limestone chimney. The yard was three overgrown acres. When the owner left them alone in the back garden to talk it over, Victor swept a brittle hydrangea away from a stone bench so Isobel could sit.
He was too fidgety to settle down, but Isobel was very still, looking skeptically at the house. The porch floor off the back sagged under the weight of a discarded cookstove. A shutter on the attic window twisted free like a broken wing.
“Izzy, a little elbow grease… ”
“A lot, Victor.”
She turned to him. “A lot of elbow grease.”
“Wallpaper is cheap, Izzy. And I can find someone to fix that chimney.”
“Let’s hope.”
The house sat high on a ridge, separated from town by a stand of young red pine and a quarter-mile-wide shelf of weedy clay propped up by low cliffs. It was easy to see how the place had failed as a farm; the slope was too angled, the soil too hard. Most of the acreage had been sold off long before, and what had been orchard was now a growing neighborhood of two-story houses.
“Clapboard’s rotten over on that corner, see?”
“That? That’s nothing. Look at those windows. It’s got a fine view of the lake, doesn’t it?”
By his glassy look Isobel knew he was envisioning the house spruced and painted, not the hulk before them.
“Well, it’s awfully big, Vic.”
“Yeah, plenty of room.”
It was the only house they’d seen that they could afford.
They signed the contract.
Victor made a three-piece suit for a local brick mason who was getting married. In return the mason tore down and rebuilt the chimney. A plumber came and spent an ominous hour peering at the old boiler before rubbing his whiskers and pronouncing, “She’s a leaker.”
Isobel winced. “And?”
“S’pose I could patch her up for now, but you’re gonna need new.”
“New what? New patch?”
“Hah! Boiler.”
The money they had saved for their honeymoon was spent on a reconditioned boiler that didn’t look much better than the old one. During the weeks they should have been at an island resort in Michigan, Isobel learned how to glaze windows and scrape paint from clapboards without gouging. She didn’t mind the missed honeymoon, was even a little relieved. She’d secretly dreaded the ferry ride, imagining Lake Huron as wild as the Atlantic; she hadn’t wanted Victor to see her vomiting over the side, weak and afraid.
They spent days peeling stained wallpaper and a filthy week replacing the sash weights in every window of the house. Victor sold the nickel off the old cookstove and had the bones of it hauled away. He spent four miserable days under the porch, shoring up its beams. A constant stream of foul language rang from under the decking to the second story, where Isobel patched plaster, papered walls, and painted what seemed like miles of trim. She regularly crept down to set a glass of lemonade or a cold beer near the hole in the broken porch skirting. Victor’s dirt-creased hand would reach out and grope for her leg, his voice rasping like Dracula’s, “Tank you, my lovely.”
He would drain his glass in gulps, laugh maniacally, and then worm back underneath. The pounding and cursing would resume.
Every night they fell wrecked to their mattress on the floor of the living room, and when they woke, squinting against the sun streaming through curtainless windows, the first thing they did was reach for handkerchiefs to clear plaster dust and soot from their noses. Years later Victor would tell the children that those early days of their marriage were “the most fun I’ve never had.”
Isobel attacked the garden, hacking out brush and laying out a tiny vegetable plot, where she grew anemic tomatoes and pale lettuce. She pulled up overgrown roses and peonies and encouraged the lower flowering vegetation to take over the yard.
Victor crouched next to where she knelt at her task. He scratched his scalp and pointed to her latest crop of transplanted prizes. “Creeping Charlie and bunchberry might be considered weeds in some gardening circles, Iz.”
Isobel pushed the kerchief back over her forehead and leaned over her trowel. “Well, you know what they say, Victor, ‘One man’s weed.’ Look, it’s pretty and it doesn’t need to be mowed or tended. I don’t give a hoot if it’s crabgrass.”
Victor pointed out a freshly planted spot near the birdbath. “But this is crabgrass, Izzy.”
Isobel bit back a smile and made a motion to throw the trowel at Victor. “Oh, just hush. Just shut your —”
He knelt in front of her. “Mouth?”
He covered hers.
Her voice was muffled by his kiss. “I was going to say trap.”
Isobel’s father retired just after the wedding, and the closing of the family bakery assured Victor of a spacious storefront for considerably less than market value. Isobel’s parents packed and got on the train headed for St. Paul and their new apartment near the state capitol. Victor blew a riot of insincere kisses to the back end of the caboose, until Isobel thumped him hard. When the train was out of sight, he nearly sprinted to the old bakery to begin remodeling.
He rented out the upstairs apartment to a cheerful Welsh widow whose miner husband had died of gangrene after nicking his forehead on an iron cleat in an underground tunnel.
As Victor dismantled the huge gas ovens and prepared to haul them out back, he inclined his head toward the south quadrant of the shop, bright with light from a trio of manypaned windows. He grunted as he lifted an iron stovepipe.
“That’s where you can do your little hat business, Izzy, right there.”
Before she could even think, the first baby was on its way.
She’d made some progress in the shop, another bank of shelves cleaned, nests of thread bound by dust were pulled from corners. Leaning back, she wound a string of copper and glass disks around her wrist, remembering the blind Indian she’d bought them from during an autumn trip to Fond du Lac.
Victor had stopped the car at a roadside market to buy pumpkins and to let Henry out for a few minutes. While he took Henry to the outhouse behind the gas station across the road, Isobel wandered over to a low table where an ancient brown woman was selling trinkets. When she said hello, the woman’s only response was a low grunt and a suspicious sniff. After Isobel picked out some disks and handed over her money, the old woman felt the dollar bill as if to determine its authenticity and tossed a few coins in change on the table, mumbling something indiscernible. Suddenly she reached out and laid a gnarled hand on Isobel’s flat abdomen.
“Abinoojiins.” Her voice suddenly precise. The woman nodded, her face blank as stone, her eyes milky and unblinking. She repeated, “Abinoojiins. Bizaan.”
“Pardon?”
Isobel stepped back, recoiling from the trails of warmth where the woman’s fingers had touched her. “Pardon me?” she repeated.
The old woman did not respond but stared sightlessly at Isobel’s torso, nodding solemnly. Isobel shuddered and turned away, leaving her change on the table, only to bump into a much younger Ojibwa woman. The woman smiled at her and explained, “She mean the baby. Quiet baby. Still.”
“Still baby?”
Isobel glared back at the old woman. “She’s crazy.”
Suddenly feeling ill, she clutched her beads and wobbled to the car. Nauseous and sweating, she watched blackflies drill at the windshield and waited for Victor to return with little Henry.
She did not tell him of the old woman’s prophetic warning, but endured the next seven months of her pregnancy in a daze, resigned to the grim knowledge that the baby growing inside her would be born dead.
Isobel kept her eyes closed for the entirety of her brief labour, blindly stroking the arc of her stomach. The midwife wiped tears from Isobel’s face, and after the final push, Isobel heard the sharp intake of the midwife’s breath. She turned to face the wall. The birth had been quick and surprisingly easy compared to Henry’s. She brought fistfuls of sheets to her face, pressed them to her eyes. After a few moments of silence
, it occurred to her that the poor midwife did not know what to say. Isobel weakly offered, “It’s all right, Ida, I know.”
“You know? What do you know?”
Ida placed the wrapped infant on the bed next to Isobel. “It’s a girl. A very red-faced baby girl. Lovely, born with a caul. That’s good luck, no? See how quiet she is, Isobel? Not a peep.”
Isobel looked at the bundle, saw the tiny lips move on the creased face. She struggled to sit up and completely unwrapped the baby, recalling the words of the two Ojibwa women. Bizaan — quiet baby, still baby. The naked infant slowly waved her curled fists and stared crookedly into her mother’s face with fierce concentration. The tears in Isobel’s eyes blurred her vision and fell to the tiny shoulder.
Quiet baby.
She pressed the infant to her and laughed. The name came to her in a whisper. Louisa.
~ ~ ~
Thomas leaned in as his mother’s voice faded. For the last fifteen minutes she’d mumbled in her sleep, something about an Indian. Gibberish mostly, and then suddenly Louisa, whispered but clear.
Her name was a jolt. He hadn’t heard her mentioned for years. He never brought her up, and certainly his mother didn’t. When he thought of his dead sister the odd tightness in his neck came back.
He pulled the shade against the city skyline and poured a glass of fresh water in case his mother woke up thirsty. He checked his watch. Ten. That late?
She’d said Louisa. He supposed every parent had their favorite.
~ ~ ~
Louisa surprised her by coming into the shop at noon, bringing tomato sandwiches, apples, and a bottle of lemonade. She had prepared the lunch herself, packed it, and brought it down from the house. When Isobel was finished eating, the girl quietly cleaned up the mess and put out a hand to take away Isobel’s empty paper cup.
Isobel took Louisa’s hand, shaking it solemnly. “Thanks, sweetheart. That was a lovely lunch.”
Louisa blushed and turned away, but not before Isobel saw her broad smile. “You do your work, Momma, and I’ll do mine.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
These Granite Islands Page 7
