The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “Why not?”

  “It sounds common.” Her mother, born in New York City of French parents, had grown up mostly in Europe and had a slight timbre of accent, delicate and French.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s ugly. And brusque. It sounds rude.”

  So in five months Iseult would be going off to boarding school, but at that moment she was still down the cellar with Patrick Dubois and the game that had run out of words after that question of his.

  She finally said, “No, thank you.”

  Whenever she recalled that afternoon, what came back first was the April light. Had it been November she never would have gone down there with him.

  “Aw, come on.”

  “I believe I’ll go upstairs now.”

  “Don’t be a minx. One little kiss.”

  “I believe I’ll go upstairs.”

  “Aw, come on. It’s not going to hurt, Iseult.”

  “I must go home now. Please let me go.”

  “Not until I get a kiss,” Patrick Dubois said. “Come on now, Iseult, I don’t want to get your clothes dirty. You’re so clean, Iseult. The cleanest person in the world, you are.”

  He hadn’t moved, or touched her. He was just looking at her, and she sensed that, if she acted wisely, the situation might be brought back under her control.

  “All right,” she said.

  “On the lips. Has to be on the lips, now. A real kiss.”

  Crouching under the floor joists, arms by his sides: a big boy, clumsy. If she was quick she could dodge him and probably beat him up the stairs. She didn’t move. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

  “Sheesh,” he said. “Are you going to or not?”

  She took a step closer and, standing on the tips of her toes, brushed his lips very quickly with her own. “There.” She stepped back. “Now you’re going to tell everyone I kissed you. You’re going to say it was my idea, aren’t you.”

  His lips rough, dry, tasting of carriage drives on dusty roads.

  He shook his head. “I won’t, Iseult.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise I won’t.”

  “If you don’t tell anyone, maybe we’ll come down here again sometime.”

  She left him standing at the schoolhouse door, a broom in his hands, while she went out into the lucid light. Sweeping up was another of his duties, also washing blackboards, straightening desks, locking up. How much did the town pay him for all those chores — twenty dollars a year? His father would have kept all the money.

  Silver bare trees lined her walk home.

  How often after that had she gone down the cellar with Patrick Dubois? She never let him put his arms around her or touch her, but their kisses ripened. She learned the taste of his mouth and tongue. And she wrapped her arms around his powerful neck, folded her knees, and felt his erection scuffle through their clothes as she lifted her feet off the ground, so that he was taking her weight on his neck and shoulders, so that she was hanging from him — he the trunk, she the branch.

  Everyone who had ever been close to her had tried to insist on their right to control her. She knew her own body only slightly. The sexual feeling was like turning her face to the sun.

  Another person could seem as clear as a glass of water, but water was still a mystery, wasn’t it? Springing from depths as it did. Drenching from the sky.

  ~

  Her mother’s Pasadena lawyer, a Spaulding of the Massachusetts Spauldings, said, “There’ll be no trouble selling the house, but Venice? Really, Iseult. Those beach towns are tawdry.”

  Spaulding was a stern Yankee gentleman and a founding member of the Pasadena Theosophical Society. He had persuaded Iseult’s mother to join when she became ill with the stomach cancer that would kill her. Iseult had been to a few theosophy meetings; it sounded like nonsense to her. Something happened to stern New England Congregationalists — and devout Roman Catholics — in California. Maybe it was the sunlight, or the orange juice, or the sweet desert dust in the air. Iseult couldn’t imagine the same people back in New Hampshire earnestly discussing reincarnation, astral bodies, and oneness with the universe.

  “Have you ever been to Venice?” she asked Spaulding.

  The lawyer shuddered. “No, but I read in The Times that the red cars carried twenty thousand out there last weekend. Quite a horde! Not the place for me, thank you very much.”

  “I own Pacific Electric stock, don’t I?”

  He nodded. “You do. A little.”

  “Do you?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “Then shouldn’t we be happy that all those people are riding out there?”

  “It doesn’t mean we have to go with them. You ought to consider Santa Barbara, if you must live by the sea.”

  Two weeks later Mr. Spaulding, radiating Puritan disapproval the whole way, drove her in his automobile out to Venice to sign the sale agreement. His peevishness intensified when they found Mr. Grattan O’Brien in the shabby real estate office with his feet up on the desk, this time reading a book. Another man, dark and stocky and almost too well dressed, was sitting at another desk reading a newspaper.

  “My brother Joe O’Brien, Miss Wilkins. Joe’s on his way to Mexico. He has been building a railway in Canada all summer.”

  “Which line?” the lawyer asked.

  “Canadian Northern,” Joe O’Brien replied politely. “A mountain section, through the Selkirks in British Columbia.”

  “You’re an engineer?”

  “I’ve one or two on my payroll. I have the construction contract, you see.”

  He wasn’t exactly handsome, not like his brother, but his black hair was thick. He was perfectly shaved, his stiff collar was snowy and perfect, but something about him was dark and hard, gleaming.

  Spaulding looked at the young man more closely. “I’ve always said that the only people who make money from railroads are the men who build them. No one sees a profit running them, shareholders least of all.”

  “My piece is frozen up and snowed under at the moment, so I’ll be finishing in the spring. I intend to look into some work down in Mexico. They’ve been planning a line from Chihuahua to the Pacific. It’s mountain country.”

  “How old are you, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’m twenty-five. But I’ve been in the business a while.”

  “The Mexicans are in the throes of revolution.”

  “They’re going to want to build that line someday. So I’d like to have look.”

  Picking up his newspaper, Joe O’Brien moved to a desk at the front of the office while Grattan started handing over documents to the lawyer, who settled gold-framed spectacles on the end of his nose and scanned each page.

  Something made Iseult look around and catch Mr. Joe O’Brien looking straight at her. He held her gaze boldly for a few moments before turning back to his newspaper. If she never saw him again she’d not forget him. Not exactly a rough, but not smooth either. It was confidence, not his looks, that made him seem older than twenty-five.

  The lawyer said something but she missed it.

  “Excuse me, what did you say?” she asked, irritated with Joe O’Brien for looking at her so appraisingly.

  “You won’t be allowed to sell to Jews, Mexicans, or coloured.” The lawyer spoke without looking up from the document in his hand.

  “Mr. Kinney was instructed by his lawyers to put that in,” Grattan said. “It’s the standard thing, here along the coast, anyway.”

  “Of course it is, and a good thing too,” the lawyer said. “Protects everyone.”

  “Are Catholics all right?” she said, just to prick Spaulding, though he had come all the way from Pasadena as a favour to her.

  The lawyer, who had been devoted to Iseult’s Catholic mother, ignored her question.

  “Of course, of course,” said Grattan.

  “Well,” said Spaulding, shuffling the papers together, “this is all in order, but are you certain it’s
what you want, Iseult? Can you really find happiness so far from your friends?”

  People always wanted her to be safe, maybe more for their sakes than her own.

  “I can afford it, can’t I?”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “Thank you for your advice. And thank you for coming out here. I’m very grateful. But this is what I want.”

  “If you’re ready to sign, I’ll call in the notary,” said Grattan. “He’s just across the street.”

  The lawyer checked his watch. “I’ve a lunch engagement at the Jonathan Club in exactly one hour, Iseult. I can take you as far as Hill Street.”

  “No, thank you. After we’re finished here I think I will visit my little house.”

  As soon as the papers were signed and notarized, Spaulding shook hands with Iseult, nodded briskly at the young men, and left, giving her the impression that he was washing his hands of the whole business. Grattan was searching in his desk drawer for her keys when Joe O’Brien spoke up.

  “Congratulations, Miss Wilkins. I wish you the joy of it.”

  “Why, thank you, Mr. O’Brien.”

  Maybe he expected her to look away first, maybe that was what he was used to, but she wouldn’t, and was satisfied when, after a few more moments, he looked down again at his newspaper. A little test of wills, and she’d won.

  Grattan, meanwhile, was still rummaging for keys. She picked up the slender volume on his desk.

  Poems of the Past and Present

  by

  Thomas Hardy

  “I never understand poetry,” she announced, a little proudly.

  “Yes, well, maybe that’s the point,” Grattan said. “Ah, here they are.” He offered her the keys on a little metal ring.

  “But why read something you can’t understand?”

  “To participate in the mystery!”

  From his chair across the room, Joe O’Brien snorted.

  Grattan smiled. “Joe claims he doesn’t have an ounce of artistic sensibility in his body. He says he’s the one of the family that does not. A hard man through and through, aren’t you, Joe.”

  “Artistic sensibility never bought you a pair of boots,” his brother said.

  “That’s true. Joe, how about going out to the Linnie with Miss Wilkins? The place hasn’t been opened or aired since you were there last, Miss Wilkins. Joe can check if the water’s turned on and see that you have no trouble with the front door sticking and such.”

  “Thank you, that won’t be necessary. I can manage perfectly well.”

  “Oh, let old Joe accompany you, Miss Wilkins. He’s a gentleman of leisure these days.”

  Joe O’Brien got to his feet. “It is no trouble,” he said. “I should like to see the property.”

  Grattan was graceful, amiable, and unformed, but some essence of Joe O’Brien was implacable. He stood waiting by the door, hat in his hand.

  She nodded. “Very well.” But as soon as they were outside she said, “You really needn’t take the trouble, Mr. O’Brien. I can find my way by myself.”

  “Well, I need the exercise.”

  They were the same height exactly. His dark suit, stiff collar, and homburg seemed out of place on Windward Avenue, where dapper fellows wore ice-cream suits, white shoes, yellow straw hats.

  They headed out to Linnie, walking the path along the Grand Canal.

  “I’ve never been to Venice, Italy,” he said. “Does it look much like this?”

  “Hardly.”

  “You seem like someone who has seen a lot of different places.”

  “I was in Venice when I was twelve. I’d like to go back someday.”

  “I aim to see all those European places.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “Why would you want to live alone?” he asked.

  She glanced at him.

  “I guess you don’t have to answer,” he said. “It’s none of my business but I’d like to know. I’ve lived alone, and I liked it well enough for a while.”

  “I want room to breathe,” she said.

  The fact was that she had been following some instinct she barely understood. Her mother would have called it a whim. It was more than that, but it wasn’t a carefully thought-out plan.

  They walked in silence for a while and he seemed lost in thought. Was he mulling over her response? Maybe he was thinking of railroads in Mexico.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “I guess I understand. Everyone needs that.”

  “Does it make sense, Mr. O’Brien, do you think?”

  He hardly knew her, but he would speak the truth.

  “You’ll know in a while.”

  They continued walking in silence. The silence somehow felt engaging, not awkward. Perhaps because she could sense he was thinking about her.

  “You can rely on my brother,” he said after a while. “If you have any trouble out here, you can rely on Grattan. Elise too. You ought to meet her.”

  “Perhaps I shall. You’re building a railroad, Mr. O’Brien. I suppose you’re never alone.”

  “Just a piece of a railway,” he corrected. “I have thirty-five miles and hope to get more. There’s seven hundred miles, more or less, to be built.”

  “How many men work for you?”

  “My outfit? Just before the freeze-up, fifteen hundred. Give or take. They’re scattered now.”

  “Where are they?”

  He laughed for the first time. “That’s a question. I’ll round up another bunch in the spring. Some can’t talk a word of English. A lot of them are foreigners, or Chinese.”

  He showed little warmth on the surface but there was something inside, fiery. He was strange and hard but he was interested in her; he listened.

  “You’re not a poet,” he said. “Are you an artist?”

  “I daub, I sketch. I play the piano, unhappily.”

  “Unhappily?”

  “Because I’m not very good.”

  “‘Room to breathe’ — that makes sense to me. Of course, I want to do more than breathe.”

  It was such an odd thing to say. When she looked at him, he smiled. Then she had to smile too.

  “My manners need work,” he admitted. “It comes of living in the muck and the mountains. I’ve a little book of manners I study from time to time. I even practise fine phrases in the mirror — you’d laugh to see me.”

  “Would I?”

  “I think you would. Does this look familiar, Miss Wilkins?”

  They had arrived at the Linnie Canal.

  “Yes. And there’s my cottage.” Smaller than she remembered.

  “I guess you might rather go in alone,” he said. “Call me if you want a hand with anything. I’ll wait outside.”

  He waited on the canal path while she fitted the key into the door and let herself in. She went quickly around the small, bare rooms. They delighted her. Everything white and empty and sunlit. The place needed a good dusting and cleaning and some furniture, but that was all. The space felt light, generous, open. This would be the real beginning of her life.

  She went back to the door. “Everything’s quite all right, Mr. O’Brien. Would you care to inspect the place?”

  She held the door open as he came in, removing his hat. “You are my first visitor, Mr. O’Brien, the first I’ve ever invited into a place of my own.”

  “That is an honour.”

  She led him through the little house. There really wasn’t much to show. “It’s the light I love,” she said. “Just as it is right now.”

  “You’ll want furniture.”

  “But not too much. I’m not keen on furniture. People fill their houses with big, dark blocks of — I don’t know what — upholstery, and stuffing, and smelly wood. Furniture steals the light, that’s what it does.”

  “Gives you something to sit on, though.”

  She laughed. “Yes, you’re right.”

  “The Chinese don’t have much use for chairs, even a camp stool. On the works you’ll see the C
hinamen squatting on their haunches, eating and talking a mile a minute. Sound like birds. Clever birds. They are good workers.”

  “This will be my bedroom, I think.”

  He hardly glanced at it. The room had no trace of anything female or personal, but she sensed his discomfort. Instead he peered into the spare room on the other side of the hall. “You could keep a maid in here.”

  “I don’t want a servant, won’t have one. We’d be on top of each other. I’ll find a woman to come in by the day and clean. I can take care of myself. I’ll want to leave this room empty, I think.”

  “Empty? You ought to get some use of it.”

  “I don’t mean I won’t use it. I’ll leave it empty and let it fill up with ideas.”

  He was looking at her oddly.

  “I might do some painting in here. Or drawing. Or reading, or just thinking.”

  “You’ve an artistic sensibility.”

  “Perhaps. And it’s never bought me a pair of boots either.”

  ~

  The week after Iseult took possession of the Linnie cottage, she sold most of the furniture in the Pasadena house to a dealer. She gave all her mother’s clothes, except one shawl, to Cordelia. The table silver she kept, most of the china, and all her books. Also two trunks of linens and a cedar chest packed with blankets woven in the New Hampshire mill.

  Moving day was a Sunday. Cordelia’s husband, Floyd, owned a half-share of a motor truck. They arrived with their thirteen-year-old nephew Chisholm for a helper, Cordelia wearing an enormous blue hat and a starched apron over her satin going-to-church dress.

  Floyd and Chisholm loaded up the truck and they set off, with Iseult squeezed into the front seat between Floyd and Cordelia, the nephew riding in back with the chests and trunks. At a filling station at Palms Junction they ate a picnic lunch of fried chicken while Floyd and Chisholm repaired a flat tire.

  When Iseult opened the front door of the cottage, the first thing she saw was a dozen white roses in a bucket on the floor. There was a note:

  Venice Land Company

  Windward Avenue

  Venice, Calif.

  Tues., Feb. the 2nd

  Dear Miss Wilkins,

  Good luck in your new home, I will call around to see if anything is needed.

  Regards,