These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  On the way to Isobel’s house they stopped to pick wildflowers. They gathered crowded bouquets, their arms spilling with the flowers Cathryn had spoken of. In the kitchen Cathryn and Louisa arranged them in a large spongewear crock, the girl rapt as Cathryn recited the proper names, teaching as she poked each stem into the mass of colour. Louisa’s eyebrows snailed in effort as she paired the names with the flowers, pursing her mouth and watching Cathryn’s lips, holding back until she was sure she could pronounce the Latin words properly, speaking only when she could do so precisely.

  Isobel sat on the counter and watched this exchange. She saw herself in the girl’s efforts, realizing how often she herself held back when it came to new things, taking on new situations. Victor accused her of being cautious to a fault, but she’d never really understood what he meant. It touched her how Louisa wanted so badly to pronounce the words right the first time. She saw they had this in common; both would choose not having a thing if it involved risk.

  “I went and picked up your mail while you were having your CAT scan. Just a few bills and this package from Cypress.”

  Isobel squinted at the return address. “From Louisa?”

  “Louisa?”

  Thomas peered over his glasses. “Mother?”

  Isobel looked out the window. “Robert, of course, I meant Robert.”

  “Yes, it’s from Robert.”

  His brother-in-law still lived in the house he’d shared with Louisa during their marriage, the same house Thomas and she had grown up in. “Look here, it says ‘book rate.’ Seems he’s sent you some book.”

  Thomas opened the package and handed her a thin volume, its green binding furry with mildew.

  “Oh, wonderful. He found the one I wanted.”

  “And here’s a note.”

  “Will you read it, please?”

  Thomas cleared his throat. “Dear Isobel, Glad to hear you’re doing so well. I’ll send along some pictures of the grandkids before they head back to school (I barely see them myself, between their dates and weekend trips). Both my girls say ‘hello and kisses to Gran.’ Stay well, Robert.”

  Isobel took the note. “Did he send something else? I’d asked for a magnifying glass.”

  “You need a magnifying glass? Has your sight slipped that much?”

  “For your information, it was never that good. I ruined my eyes long ago, but now, since the stroke… Well, look at the size of this print! Even you’d need glasses to read it.”

  “Mother, I am wearing glasses.”

  He leaned over. “Ah, more poetry.”

  He closed the book. “I never had much time for poetry, only what we had to read in college. I never liked much of it.”

  Isobel shrugged. “I only read what I liked. It took me a while to warm to poetry. I never cared for that e. e. cummings, for instance. I always wanted to take a red pen and correct those silly stanzas falling off the page. What was the purpose of all that, anyway?”

  Thomas shrugged and swabbed an antiseptic pad over the tiny sore on Isobel’s hand.

  “Shouldn’t a nurse be doing this?”

  Isobel looked at the pinhole in her flesh left from the IV.

  “This is a hospital, all the nurses are busy.”

  “I liked that Eliot, though. I even memorized parts of his poems. Would you like to hear one?”

  “Certainly, love to.”

  Isobel closed her eyes and began in a wavering voice. “Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning / Death / Those who… ” She frowned. “Those who… ”

  Thomas crumpled the gauze between his fingers and dropped it in the wastebasket. “You’re not dying, Mother.”

  “And how would you know? Shush, I’ve got it. Those who suffer the ecstasy of animals… ”

  Thomas turned to wash at the sink.

  “None of this is in order, mind you.”

  Isobel rubbed at the spot on her hand. “… are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind.”

  Thomas waited but she’d gone quiet, was sniffing at the binding of the book in her hand.

  “Mother?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember the rest of it now. Doesn’t matter. Here, Thomas, put this in my closet, please. And see if there’s a hairbrush in there, would you? I must look a fright.”

  He took the book from her. “You look just fine. If there was a beauty contest on this ward right now, you’d win.”

  He checked her closet. The skirt she’d been wearing when he found her hung crookedly on a hanger. He pushed it aside. Her suitcase was open and empty, the old, battered hatbox she’d asked him to bring sat high on the shelf. As he took it down he saw it was missing its handle. Inside were a few more books, a pair of tweezers, two bars of French soap in wax paper, a square of tailor’s lead, and a leather photo album. He ran his hand over the worn gold lettering on the album. He slowly turned. “Mother?”

  But her eyes were closed behind blue tissue lids. Thomas noticed how deeply they rested in their sockets. She had lost weight since being admitted, flesh stretched away from the rack of cheekbones. He watched her breathe for a minute and felt her wrist. When he let go her hand fell like a weight. She shifted under the blanket.

  Thomas settled in the bedside chair and opened the album.

  The first page was taken up by a formal wedding portrait. His father looked exactly as Thomas remembered — wiry, mischievous, his own younger face. His mother was tiny next to her groom, and his father had not been a big man. Thomas glanced over the blanket. She was even smaller now, a husk on the hospital bed. He realized he’d always imagined her to be larger than she really was. How long now since he’d seen her standing?

  In the portrait she was a lovely girl, her angular jaw softened by the bridal veil and the sweep of blond hair draped over each temple. Her eyes were clear and large under arched brows, her nose narrow, and her lips smudged to look larger with a bit of lipstick. A face of delicacies and strengths, her mouth was a line of determination where any other bride might offer a smile. Thomas grinned.

  He had the sense of being watched and looked up, startled to catch his mother.

  “So, you’re still with us.”

  “I was never gone.”

  “I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

  She looked at the photograph. “Oh, that one. My mouth always displeased me in that picture.”

  Her vanity surprised him. “It shows you’re made of tough stuff.”

  “What bride wants to look tough?”

  She shook her head. “A thin mouth, that’s a blight on any woman. I always thought, I always imagined that a generous mouth portended some… I don’t know, largesse of spirit. Sensuality.”

  “Ah well, Dad must have found you sensual enough.”

  Isobel smiled. Thomas began to speak and swallowed, dropping his chin to avoid her eyes. As they fell into an awkward silence, Thomas felt his mother’s physical presence more keenly than he had in years. The sharpness of bones that had not always been sharp.

  She would have once reveled in her physical self like anyone else. She would have run bare-legged as a child, danced as a girl; she would have nursed her babies, nursed him. She would have walked on ice without fear. She had carried him. He closed his eyes to the bright curtain of a memory patched together of primary colours.

  A summer afternoon composed of deep blue sky, red geraniums, and a yellow dress. His mother grasping both his wrists and dragging him sideways, the movement difficult at first, his ankles raking the grass, but then she was laughing and he was spinning, suddenly airborne. As he left the earth, swooping in an arc just above the grass, blades skimmed and tickled his bare heels. He rose higher in flight, the joy of it spiced with danger. Above him flashed a zoetrope of endless sky and flapping laundry, a row of white dishcloths became rectangular clouds. Sky and dress and sky. Blue, yellow, blue. At that moment his world was fixed in colour and speed, and he believed his mother had conceived it all. Joy and danger both owned in her steadfast gri
p.

  He looked at the now withered arms, the upturned claw of her weak hand. The hand was null, held nothing. His own hands still did his bidding, and he daily took for granted their ability to do what he set them to — maneuver a car along a winding road, soundly shake the hand of a client, or plant a hedge of oleander. Even arouse a woman. He wasn’t dead yet.

  She would have had desires once. Of course she’d had desires.

  He shook his head. “Where are you, Thomas?”

  He stared. Her eyes burned with the same determination as the young woman’s in the photograph. The same lovely woman.

  “I’m right here, Mother.”

  When she woke again, he was gone. The photo album sat on the chair where he had left it, opened to another photograph, the one showing her surrounded by her children.

  Her own face stared up at her. Not so different, really, than how she’d looked with Victor. She’d carried a young face her whole life. Blessed, some said. Until she was fifty, people often misjudged her age by at least ten years. But in this photograph her mouth was even more severe.

  Of all, why that picture? It was the worst time, the worst possible reminder. She tapped a fingernail over the faces. Thomas, a gangly ten-year-old, stood stiffly at her shoulder, his eye grown steely, his childhood suddenly over. Louisa was fourteen but no taller than Thomas. She stood pressing toward her mother, and her hand trailed down Isobel’s sleeve to rest protectively on her forearm. Henry stood serious in his navy uniform, aloof, already set apart. He was itching to be overseas, she remembered that.

  The photographer had wanted her to prop a picture of Victor in her lap so the portrait would include him. “Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?”

  Isobel muttered to the empty room. “Victor would spin in his grave.”

  On the afternoon of her fortieth birthday, Isobel walked into the shop to find Victor slumped over his worktable. At first she thought he was pulling a prank. Typical Victor. She tiptoed forward, ready to pounce.

  When she saw the thread of orange saliva connecting his lower lip to his sleeve, she recoiled, pitched forward, then back again, legs buckling precisely under her in sections, a pair of folding reeds. You wouldn’t. No, Victor, you wouldn’t!

  For a full year she moved as if against a current. Walking to the grocery story she would marvel, I am walking to the grocery store, placing one foot in front of the other. I will buy eggs and meat and carry them home.

  I am making a bed, as though it matters whether this bed gets made.

  Louisa was fourteen and working in the shop after school. Isobel had decided to keep up with some of the easier tailoring, mostly uniforms and trousers. She continued to do alterations. Sympathy business was steady. There was just enough money. The millinery limped along, just surviving.

  Thomas worried her. He began to hang around with older boys who cut classes and loitered openly at the curb of the drugstore as if to taunt the truancy officer. He and his pals attached themselves to buildings, smoking and leaning through the school hours until the bell finally rang and their task was over. Thomas’s grades plunged, and he took to coming home late and sullen, rarely meeting her eye when she confronted him. When his dead father’s name was mentioned he would rise silently and leave the room.

  He began to reform only after Henry’s body was returned from the South Pacific to be buried next to Victor’s.

  As Henry’s coffin was lowered into the earth, Isobel watched paralyzed as Thomas and the other mourners turned. She knew what they were seeing, but her neck was stone. They were looking at the clay hump of the next grave. The other wound on the earth.

  It was the last picture taken of Henry. Isobel peered at the outline of her elder son. If she’d had to describe him, she would need this picture to be able to pair words to his features. He’d been only nineteen when he was killed. She’d only been his mother that long.

  ~ ~ ~

  The room was airless. A locker. Isobel rang twice, three times, for the nurse to come open the window. While waiting she closed the album over her lap, pressed a thumb over the embossed letters, pressing. Pressing as if to render them smooth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ~ ~ ~

  Cathryn’s new watercolours were no longer of remembered hats, but Isobel’s own creations, painted in crisp detail, but with one side fading into shadow or simply unfinished, so that the hats seemed to be emerging from the thick watercolour paper by magic. The faces of the models were regally simple, drawn with only a few strokes of black ink to define a profile; a curving lip, one closed lid, the sweep of a cheek.

  As a surprise, Isobel had six of the paintings framed in slim walnut. She smuggled them into the shop one morning and hung them over the register. Cathryn came in just as she was climbing down from the ladder, hammer in hand. Isobel gazed up at the display.

  “Don’t they look nice all fitted out and hung like that?”

  “Oui! Très, très chic, madame.”

  She skipped over to Isobel and crushed her in a hug, kissing her on both cheeks.

  On the pavement outside a man passed, movement inside the store momentarily catching his eye. He did not slow his gait but turned just long enough to glimpse two women through the wavering glass. Their backs to the window, the women stepped back in a seemingly choreographed motion, both raising their left arms at the same time as if to indicate something on the wall. One of the women held a hammer. Their arms dropped simultaneously and they both cocked their heads slightly. The man smiled and quickly moved on.

  A large carton with Cathryn’s name on it arrived at the shop, but Isobel could not get her to open it.

  “It’s a sur-prise,” Cathryn sang, dancing around the carton. When Isobel reached out to run a finger along its edge. Cathryn slapped her hand away, clucking, “If you’re naughty, Izzy, I’ll send it ba-ack.”

  The carton sat in the storage hall until Isobel forgot about it.

  The shelves began to fill with hats. They transferred a dozen of them to the window, stepping in and out the front door several times to view the display from the sidewalk, making sure the hats were aligned at proper angles, and separating those that clashed. Cathryn hung pale blue tags on each and priced them with green ink.

  “Green for summer.”

  Isobel read the tags and gasped. “For greed, you mean. Cathryn, these prices are far too high. I can’t possibly ask so much. Who would buy them?”

  “No one. They’d be crazy if they did. Listen, here’s what you do. You price them high and make sure the tags are visible from outside. Women window-shop. It’s simple psychology. We all covet what we cannot afford, right?”

  Isobel crossed her arms. “I’m listening.”

  “You leave a set of these overpriced hats in the window for a while and then you have a big sale, mark everything forty or even fifty percent off. The good ladies of Cypress will stampede in, buy hats at a fair price, and walk out thinking they’ve gotten the bargain of their lives. It’s a snap. Three or four seasonal sales each year, and in the times between, it will be very, very peaceful around here.”

  Isobel clapped her hands. “And the rest of the time I could just work?”

  “Exactly.”

  The display in the window was slow to draw attention. Isobel noticed that only a few women passing stopped at the window. Some came to a full stop and openly examined the hats, but none came in to browse. Isobel felt defeated.

  “I’ve spent so much money.”

  She moaned.

  “It’s only been a few weeks, Isobel.”

  Cathryn’s cheerfulness didn’t buoy her.

  “I suppose I could take out an ad.”

  It wasn’t long before the first hat sold. The portly wife of a mine supervisor came in and pointed to a netted cap she had admired in the window. She was given a mirror and fussed over by Cathryn, who affected a French accent as she placed the hat on the matron’s head with a flourish. The woman turned left and right. “It is quite pretty, isn’t
it?”

  “Oui, madame. Mizz Isobel, she’s an artiste, no?”

  The woman smiled broadly at her fat image. “I’ll take it.”

  “Exzellent choice! Un moment, madame.”

  Cathryn skipped to the storage hall. While Isobel wrote up a purchase slip, she heard the squeal of nails being pried asunder and a sharp yelp of Merde! as something wooden hit the floor.

  Isobel smiled weakly as the matron dug into her handbag. Cathryn, flushed and sucking on her fingertip, walked to the counter and set down a new hatbox.

  “Zhese were just rushed to us by box maykars in Minneapolis.”

  The box was crimson with thin black stripes, the braided handle was dark gold, and on top an ivory oval was embossed with the graceful silhouette of a woman wearing a tiny feathered hat. Curling across the oval was a single name in simple cursive, Isobel. In smaller type under the silhouette was Fine Millinery Since 1936. Isobel touched the letters of her name and looked up at her friend, but Cathryn was all business, chattering in Frenchpeppered English as she wrapped the hat in gold tissue paper. Isobel turned and stood dumbly with her hand outstretched as the matron counted eight stiff one-dollar bills into her hand. If the woman thought it odd that tears rolled down the milliner’s cheeks, she did not show it.

  Cathryn trundled the woman to the door, chirping, “Au revoir,” and gently nudged her on her way. She came back to Isobel and lifted three of the dollar bills from the immobile plane of her palm. “Izzy, can you stop leaking long enough to tell me where in this town I might buy a bottle of champagne?”

  “Champagne!”

  Isobel wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, crumpling the remaining bills and laughing. “You’ll be lucky if you can find wine, ma chérie. Try the supper club on Bay Point.”