These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  Louisa cried out then. Isobel heard a thud of frantic footsteps and another cry. By the time the man got the torch lighted again, everyone was glassy-eyed with panic. Bitter breath came hard into her face. Louisa had somehow reached her side. A moan rose up from the ground to their right. The man quickly lit their lamps and they turned as one to see Cathryn splay-legged near the rusty puddle, her skirt up to reveal the cut on her shin where she had met the ground. She looked down at the blood, and her next sound was an animal whimper.

  Isobel and Louisa each took an arm and got her up, but when they tried to help her walk to the stairs, she shook them off. When they reached the elevator Cathryn rang the bell furiously to trigger the ascension.

  The elevator clanked up the shaft and away from the rest of the group, who hung back, whispering and nodding.

  No one spoke until they were above, out and safe. They squinted in the brightness and gulped warm air.

  “Cathryn, are you all right?”

  “Sorry I panicked so.”

  She laughed, spit on her hankie and dabbed the cut. “Silly isn’t it? Guess I should add claustrophobia to my list.”

  As they walked back toward the picnic, Isobel asked casually, “Where’s Liam today?”

  She was hoping she might have Louisa fetch him to come take Cathryn home.

  Cathryn shrugged. “Oh, home. Maybe fishing. He can’t stand a crowd.”

  Isobel studied her friend, but all the anxiety in the mine dissipated in the sunlight. She tried to think of something to say.

  When Cathryn bent to brush away the red dust defining the folds of Louisa’s dress, Isobel and her daughter locked eyes, their shrugs minute.

  Isobel smoothed the fine hairs on Victor’s wrist as she spoke. “By the end of the picnic Cathryn had taught the fiddle player an Irish reel and showed Louisa all the steps, as though she had forgotten her panic in the mine, as though nothing had happened.”

  Victor nodded but remained quiet.

  Isobel rolled onto her stomach. “Now that I’m telling, I see it so much more clearly. Nearly each day was like that, Cathryn leading us up and down, from light to dark and back, showing us very tops of hills and the undersides of valleys, but never anywhere in between.”

  Their hotel room was small, enough space for a wardrobe, the walnut sleigh bed and, just under the window, a small writing desk. The contents of Victor’s pockets were spread on the polished surface: his wallet, fawncoloured and molded to the shape of his hip, the ring of brass keys, coins gritty with sand, and the odd flat stone he’d carried since coming back from the island, its grey the same shade as the October sky. Under the desk his shoes lay pitched on the hooked rug as he’d dropped them, nudging each other, vaguely pigeon-toed, like him.

  Isobel would often go back to that time on the Michigan island, reconstructing a vignette of Victor’s strewn belongings framed by the simple architecture of their room. With that memory came the feel and fit of his chest against the wings of her shoulder blades, the weight of his arms resting over hers, the proximity of his unshaven chin to her ear, a thumb idly brushing her nipple as he relayed a dream or mumbled, “Good morning, Mrs. Howard.”

  In the raw years after his death she would lie in their old bed on fall mornings, the room robbed of his scuffed shoes, the bureau clear of the loose change he always seemed to have too much of. The space where his comb and wallet used to lie gleamed, empty. When she rolled over, her temple on the sheet where his shoulder would have been, the salt of slow tears pulsed into starched cotton.

  She would not wear black. Victor had told her once it made her look peaked, but she knew he meant sallow. Her mourning clothes were watery greens and the blue shades he liked best. She ignored the raised eyebrows of the gossips in town. She wore hats the colours of another hemisphere, trailing feathers of tropical birds.

  Later, after the customary period of grief had passed, doubled itself, and passed again, she reluctantly changed the sign on the shopwindow. She insisted on scraping away the old letters herself, and as the gold and black shavings of Victor Howard — Tailor curled and fell from the putty knife, she braced herself against rungs of the ladder.

  The new name had been Louisa’s idea: the same elegant type of her hatboxes, Isobel, and just under, Fine Millinery Since 1936.

  Men, a few even Victor’s old customers, would shyly come into the shop to nervously finger hats, test brims, touch cloth flowers and bands. They would cough, clear a throat, or scuff a toe before rousing the spit to ask Isobel to go see a movie, attend a concert, or have dinner at the supper club out by the lake. She was always able to make her refusal seem as if she were doing the man a kindness by declining.

  She simply couldn’t imagine it, what they might talk about, what she would ever have in common with a history teacher, a union organizer, a widowed resort owner.

  Midforties seemed an absurd age to start again. She had her work and she still had children to raise. By the time Thomas and Louisa went away — to Michigan Tech and design school in New York — Isobel had settled into resolute widowhood, even affecting a less contentious attachment to her garden. Instead of trying to control it, she let it grow around her. She read books on horticulture and learned to prune delicately, began to give plants space instead of trying to corral them. She learned to mulch and fertilize, and standing one day with her shovel poised in a heap of manure, she came to consider her garden as she might a painting or a hat, flower beds as schemes to which she might add colour here and height there, texture and tone. She laid out curving beds that set her eye on roving journeys, constructed unexpected corners of compositions: blue delphiniums and salmon poppies wading in white baby’s breath; trumpet vine covering a fence flanked with ivory canna. She planted trout lilies along the path of flagstone she’d laid along the creek’s edge, and put back the same types of old-fashioned perennials she had once torn up: hollyhocks, peonies, old roses, and climbing hydrangea. She devoted a balsam-shaded grove to ferns and wildflowers: bog rosemary, gentian, tender bloodroot, and pasqueflowers so pale and small one had to kneel low to appreciate them.

  Her patch of lawn shrank year by year until there was only enough space for her chair and table. Here she read, looking up occasionally, each time surprised by something in her garden. It was like a room, as beautiful as any described in the novels or poems resting in her hands. She cried less often.

  Sometimes she spoke to Victor, and sometimes she imagined him responding, his laughter muted behind vines of bittersweet.

  She had known moments of trepidation and regret would come, knew even as she and Victor were mending themselves back together on the island in Michigan. She tried to articulate her fears to him during the evenings after dinner in the hotel’s empty dining room. He told her a truth: that she would find herself to be stronger than she ever thought she could be.

  She believed him. But only after he was gone.

  Much of the hotel had already been shut up for the season, and the hallways had ghostly airs, as if the footfalls and laughter of departed summer guests were held in thick carpets. She found a side door and stepped out onto the sloping lawn, walking slowly toward the marina, dew cold on her ankles.

  She detoured the groomed path leading to the docks of neat sloops and mahogany power cruisers. Finding a narrow footpath she ventured to where a line of old fishing shacks slouched, softened and greyed by the wind like old men, shingles fallen away like teeth. The uneven docks were blanketed with nets laid ready for mending. Gulls arched down but did not land, swooping only low enough to pluck at the nets, pulling up bits of rotting bait here and there.

  Beached fishing boats knelt in postures of supplication, bows fast in the sand.

  A battered sailboat thumped against the pilings, and in its rhythm a line of Eliot came to her. Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

  She stepped lightly among the nets. The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking. There was something in between, but she could only recall the
last bit. The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships…

  She smiled.

  She told Victor how she and Cathryn would find a bench close to the water and the words would flow from Cathryn to pool around her. She told him how she’d learned early on that when Cathryn began it was not worth interrupting her — anything Isobel might say butted up against Cathryn’s phrases like strings of hackneyed words competing with birdsong.

  Isobel lay in bed in a hotel by water and told it all in the best words she had. At the end of her story she turned to her husband and said, “You see? I could never tell anything the way Cathryn could.”

  Their last evening on the island was truly cold, dusk somber with the waning of autumn. Victor and Isobel put on thick sweaters and gloves and walked to the harbor. Bending forward into the wind, they climbed the jetty and made their way along the crooked finger of black stones. Their clothing slapped against them from all sides, the black air ruthless around them.

  Bracing each other with arms around waists, they fought to stay upright until the gusts lessened to a steady blow. Isobel cried some then. Victor dug for his handkerchief, but the wind dried her tears almost as they fell.

  Isobel held a peach-coloured scarf around her throat, and when she let go to regain her balance over rough stones, it was suddenly lifted from her, spiraling in an upward vortex. She and Victor watched the scarf, a pale wing rising.

  The moon crested, tipping each wave with a pale lip until the bay swelled in an undulating field of black violets. Isobel stepped away to the very point of the jetty. The icy breath of Lake Huron felt like baptism, permeating clothing to burrow into her pores. She felt an almost corporeal sense of herself lightening, a few scales of sorrow blown away, lifted and carried off like the scarf. She resolutely wiped her nose and turned to Victor.

  “I’m ready now. I’m ready to go back.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ~ ~ ~

  When Louisa came to visit from New York she saw her mother’s hair wild with grey, her demeanor oddly complacent, and her tongue a little dull. The shop was dusty, and when she examined the account ledgers she found payments past due and orders well behind schedule.

  “Mother, what’s this?”

  Isobel looked up from her book on the Canadian fur trade. “Oh, I’ll get to it. I’ve been so busy with the garden. I’ve laid a new stone path — it’s taken me ages.”

  She glanced back at her book, her voice brightening as she held up a finger. “A leading cause of death among voyageurs?”

  “Ah… freezing?”

  “No.”

  “Scalped?”

  “Nope.”

  “I dunno, Mom, exasperation?”

  “Close. Constipation!”

  In the short time she’d been home, Louisa had noticed that her mother’s routines had grown into stubborn habits; if the newspaper didn’t come, she would be out of sorts all day for not having done her crossword. On Wednesdays she ate chicken salad for lunch; if there was no chicken salad, she did not eat lunch. She’d let the house go, had closed up most of the rooms and lived in the kitchen, her bedroom, and her tangled acre of garden. When Louisa laid her suitcase on the bed in her old room, dust rose like smoke from the coverlet.

  “C’mon, up you go.” Louisa pulled her from the chair by the shopwindow. “You’re only fifty, for God’s sake.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s been ten years since Dad died and you’ve done nothing but read weird books and fertilize your annuals.”

  “Not true. I work. And I read other things.”

  Louisa glanced at the stack of library books obliterating the cash register. She bit the inside of her cheek. “No kidding. By the way, half of those are overdue.”

  She took Isobel to Seleskar’s beauty parlor to have her hair dyed back to its ashen gold. Louisa unpacked the dove grey organdy suit she had designed and sewed for her mother and made a reservation at the supper club.

  Over dessert she asked innocently, knowing the answer, “Have you rented the apartment above the shop, yet?”

  The Welsh widow living upstairs had died in April, but Isobel hadn’t roused herself to place an ad.

  “You know I haven’t. I wrote you.”

  “Great. So I can move in?”

  Isobel paused, the spoon of sugar suspended over her coffee. “You can’t honestly want to stay here, Louisa. What would you do in Cypress?”

  “Dresses.”

  Louisa pulled her portfolio from under the table and cleared a space on the cloth. She showed Isobel her designs, and a rough sketch for a new floor plan for the shop. “I know you have room for me.”

  The next month Louisa returned from New York and brought Robert. Isobel liked him immediately. He said little, but when he did speak his words were measured and well placed, economical as poetry. He smiled easily and adored Louisa. He settled quickly, and bought a canoeoutfitting service and a bankrupt float-plane business.

  Isobel offered them the house after Louisa’s first daughter was born.

  “But Mom, where will you live?”

  “Upstairs of the shop.”

  She laughed. “You’re being evicted. I want my old room back.”

  “But what about your garden?”

  “Have Robert clear enough space for a swing set, but don’t let him touch my perennial beds. I’m still the gardener.”

  The comfort of routine melded time and work into a solid if sometimes reversed line. Their orders for dresses and hats always placed them seasons ahead; autumns were spent on spring styles, in winter they planned summer. After a time it did not seem odd to be working with heathered woolens in the heat of July. Years were compartmentalized and remembered by trend, cut, line, decades defined by styles. The fifties were a blur of comical patterns and flared skirts; fads of darted tunics and unadorned caps were quickly forgotten during the sixties, when neat suits with covered buttons in nubby wool came into fashion. Isobel made endless variations of pillbox hats inspired by President Kennedy’s wife. They watched every movie starring Audrey Hepburn and raced to fill orders for look-alike garments. Louisa and her helpers sewed hundreds of sheath dresses, and Isobel topped them with broad-brimmed black hats with white bands.

  In the early seventies, Isobel threw up her hands at the wide collars and polyester fabrics, the loud patterns.

  “Ugliness defined. I’m retiring before this drives me insane. No one’s worn a hat since Eisenhower. I’m too old for this. I’m almost seventy-five.”

  “Seventy-four, Momma.”

  “If you say. Besides, I have other things to do.”

  Louisa nodded patiently. She’d heard the threat before. “Can’t you hang on just one more year?”

  She was nearly fifty herself and was ready to spend more time with Robert. Her daughters were almost grown, and the town was falling in on itself. The mines had laid off men, then laid off more. Finally the crushers had gone quiet. Houses went on the market at half their value and still did not sell. One store closed, then another. Louisa gave up on local sales when ready-to-wear clothing from Hong Kong began turning up on the shelves of what few shops still operated.

  Isobel read from an article in the paper. “Well, here’s some good news, finally. They say tourism will boom. That’s good for Robert, then.”

  He’d bought up two more resorts and had been expanding his canoe-outfitting business.

  She and Louisa stopped going to the annual fashion shows in New York and on buying trips to Chicago. On her last trip, Isobel caught a cab near the Loop and told the driver to take her to Oak Park.

  Just to see. Just to peek, she told herself — at what kind of house, block, neighborhood, Cathryn had lived in. The ink on the paper in her hand was barely legible. As she counted off numbers on the quiet street, she felt a creeping dismay as the house grew near. She tapped the driver’s shoulder.

  “Back downtown, please.”

  She suddenly knew she couldn’t bring herself to look at the house.
She didn’t need to see it. It was just a house, after all, peopled with strangers now. Nothing left of Cathryn. The confines of the car tightened around her. She crumpled the decades-old scrap and let it fall to the floor.

  After Louisa’s accident, Isobel closed the shop and wrote the same abbreviated notice to patrons and suppliers alike. She sat at her desk and held the pen as if it might crumble in her fingers. Due to a death in the family… She settled accounts and let go the women who had worked for Louisa since the late fifties, having made sure their pensions were in order. Robert helped tape newspapers across the windows, and contacted an equipment broker to sell the machines and shop fittings. Robert would be lost, she knew, but she had no choice. She would not stay to embroider his grief; she needed to be alone with her own.

  As she moved through the business of closing out a life, Isobel felt a strange lightness to her body, as if her heels made no mark. She unplugged the telephone and worked in silence, folding away a hundred garments Louisa had put her hand to. She found herself running her fingers slowly over seams, suddenly pulling the raw edges of an unfinished blouse to her mouth.

  Louisa’s body had gone directly from the lake to the undertaker and into the casket. Isobel had not seen, had not touched her daughter in death.

  On her last day in Cypress she visited the shop a final time. She emptied the register and walked the worn path to the door, lingering only for a moment. Her bag was light; she had chosen only two items… olded collage of horses made from fading wool, and a carved doll with a nail splitting its neck. She flipped the Closed sign behind her.

  This time she did wear black.

  She moved quickly. It took her less than a month to find a place in St. Paul. Thomas was twenty minutes away in one of the north suburbs. He sent a moving van up for her things and took a week off from his business to get her settled. In the days he spent helping his mother unpack and arrange furniture, she didn’t mention the accident, never spoke his dead sister’s name. He imagined she was in shock. Once everything was in place he bought her a grocery caddy and a bus pass and took her shopping for plants for her window ledges and terrace. In the hot aisle of the greenhouse she stopped, turning among the waxy ficus and the towering tropical palms.