Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  For a minute Nora was silent. “They’ll probably be back next summer,” she finally said. What else had she missed? “If Elizabeth’s health doesn’t improve.”

  He turned to look at her. “Really?” The film of plaster on his face was beginning to crack as it dried. “Gillian will be back?”

  Nora shook her head and left Michael to go back to his work, back to his longing and confusion and his sense that neither his mother nor his uncle had the slightest sense of who he was or what he wanted. How could they pretend to know anything, when they didn’t know the most important thing? In the woods, all through the closing weeks of summer, in a hollow lined with ferns and lycopodium, he and Gillian had secretly met when they were supposed to be separate and elsewhere.

  Hands, tongues, bared flesh, lifted skirts and opened trousers: what he might have expected, except that he hadn’t known what to expect. On the days it rained, they stood and wrestled in place. They lay down when it was dry. They hardly spoke, they had no words for what was going on between them. Their parents had told them nothing. Michael had heard things from the guides, but hadn’t known whether to believe them. When Gillian put her hand inside his shirt and slipped her palm down his smooth white skin, the sky spun around his head and he saw every needle on every fir and hemlock. Why wouldn’t she write to him?

  When the Vignes returned the following summer, Gillian and Michael picked up not as if they’d been out of touch for nine months, but as if they’d been talking every day. Michael ignored Clara and Elizabeth when the wagon pulled up, holding his arms out for Gillian. She leaned into them and let him lift her over the side, while her pale hair, twined low on her neck, fluttered in small strands around his face.

  After that it was Michael and Gillian on the porch together, or hunting or riding—she was a splendid horsewoman, an excellent shot—or training Helen and Dido. He turned down guiding jobs to spend time with her, and Clara did nothing to keep them apart; he was hired help to her, Nora saw, who’d be left behind come September. This was so annoying that Nora, who might have told Michael not to get involved with a guest, said nothing. She waited for the flirtation to burn itself out and watched Elizabeth, alone on the porch, pretending to read but always watching the pair and seeming to wait for the same thing.

  Meanwhile Ned continued to seek Clara’s company, although Nora, tired of the whole family, couldn’t tell whether it was Clara herself or the tales she told of Max’s exploits that so fascinated him.

  “I do love him,” she heard Clara say one day, when she was sitting a few feet away from them on the porch. “Or I did—how can I know what I feel anymore, when we never see each other?”

  Ned murmured something Nora couldn’t hear and then there was yet more talk about Max. Max in Venezuela, on the slopes of Mt. Fuji, crossing the ice fields of Alberta. Clara’s face, at first tight and drawn, softened as she supplied the details Ned asked for. Perhaps, Nora thought, Clara thought he was safe to confide in because he knew no one from her circle in New York. Yet her manner toward him seemed genuinely friendly, and when Nora asked Ned what he liked in Clara, he answered promptly.

  “It’s a kind of courage,” he said. “The way she waits, and takes care of his life for him. I admire that.”

  The mail, Nora saw, bound their friendship together. On mail days, Clara’s lap would be heaped with letters. When they were younger, she said, Max had sometimes let months go by without a word. But now—she lifted the envelopes and let them tumble back onto her skirt.

  “I’ve always let the girls read them,” Clara told Ned. “But for myself—sometimes I’ve just skimmed them, to make sure he’s all right. It’s different now that you’re so interested in his travels.” She peered at the first three envelopes in the pile. “I wonder when he got to Japan.”

  “I wish I got letters like that,” Ned said, as Nora wondered who from. Drawn into the conversation despite herself, she asked, “Do you write him back?”

  “Once a week,” Clara replied. “I used to be a great letter writer myself. But it’s never enough. What could be?”

  “My friend Copernicus,” Ned said—here Nora turned toward him in surprise: already he’d mentioned that name to Clara?—“said he used to write his sister all the time. She stayed home and looked after the family house, so he was free to travel. He said he was grateful for that.”

  “Who wouldn’t be grateful?” Clara said acidly.

  Later Ned would tell Clara a little more—but not the dream, never the dream. Which was not a dream, exactly; he was often partly conscious when this came to him. Under a brilliant sky, he and Copernicus moved through the north woods again, everything they would ever need packed tidily into the guide boat. Hunting rifles, fishing rods, line, lures, leaders, a net, a cast-iron frying pan and some slabs of bacon, blankets to toss on the balsam tips they gathered each night. Wool socks, a spare shirt. Two good knives, pipes and tobacco; Copernicus’s sketchbooks and painting supplies.

  In Ned’s dream it never rained; the fish never stopped biting and the mosquitoes never bit. They never quarreled. They moved from lake to stream with the greatest of ease, never slogging through mud at the carries, never dropping the boat or the pack-baskets. Copernicus did not pull them, every week or so, toward any hamlet where he might find a girl. And Ned himself did not feel hurried, did not always sense that the six weeks they’d planned for their holiday were flying away. He had chosen the site for the Northview Inn because it was perfect, and not because their trip had ended here, near the spot where he’d spent his first Adirondack winters.

  Once they’d set up camp by the lake, Copernicus set off for the nearest tavern, returning two days later only to say that he’d painted enough of these woods for now, it was time for him to head out West. Was Ned interested in joining him? To Ned’s own surprise, something inside him had balked at moving any farther. He’d stayed behind, not sure what kept him, while Copernicus—like Erasmus, like everyone else—went off exploring and never returned.

  Of course he was drawn to Clara, Ned thought. Tied to a wanderer, rooted herself.

  7

  What does it mean that Ned didn’t acknowledge his sister’s birthday? Perhaps, Elizabeth thinks, in his oddly delicate way he was trying to spare her feelings. Or perhaps his reminder that she visit the cottage was itself an oblique acknowledgment. The day as a kind of pilgrimage, each site that Nora knew revisited? The cottage holds all of Nora’s descendants, every trace of her physical being. The rest, Elizabeth thinks, she carries inside herself.

  As she drifts along the shore, what Ned notices from his third-floor window is the distracted sandpiper’s track she leaves in the snow. She moves toward the water’s edge and then away, back and forth as she’s always moved between her desire to embrace her family and her fear of being engulfed. Never easy with any of them except Nora, who wasn’t exactly Elizabeth’s family; nothing has ever been simple for her but her work. Ned thinks this not judgmentally but fondly, his feelings for her neither natural nor spontaneous. He loves her because she’s her mother’s daughter, and because she gave purpose and shape and even joy to the last decade of his sister’s life.

  Back in his chair, his pen in hand, he continues his interrupted letter to Clara. Elizabeth came to see me, he writes. She looks well, and sends her love. I think she has no idea of how much she now behaves like Nora—all the habits and attitudes she picked up. He pauses, wondering if that last comment will wound Clara’s feelings. Then he continues, knowing how truly Clara understands her daughter. Even the way she speaks reminds me of Nora. She’d be glad to see her father, I think. Will he stop here on his way home from Alaska?

  Still, after all their meetings, Ned knows little of this solitary wanderer other than what Clara has conveyed to him. Lines quoted from Max’s letters or repeated after a visit: from these, Ned’s constructed a version of Max’s life which resembles, he imagines, the unknown lives of Erasmus and Copernicus, his old companions. Or the life he could have led himself,
if he’d had the strength and the desire. Instead he’s stayed here, preserving animals and sheltering strangers, because this has been his nature. As it’s been Clara’s nature to build a private life for herself behind the shield of Max’s absent presence.

  You might meet him up here, he adds. It would be wonderful to see you. This letter, he sees, will be of the ordinary kind; most often they dwell on the family they now have in common. Only rarely will he mention the past to Clara, describing some long-ago incident—but when he does, she responds attentively, without pressing him. The odd result is that he hides far less from her than he hid from Nora.

  He bites the top of his pen and adds, of his only sister and Clara’s eldest daughter: I have never really understood what either of them were thinking. As he does, Elizabeth, chilled by the wind off the lake, moves more briskly toward the cottage.

  At her own house, she thinks, everyone will be stirring. There each day resembles a week, the relentless rest periods chopping the days into miniature days—awake, asleep, awake, asleep—which pass in one sense with horrible swiftness (how can a person get anything done, always dressing or undressing, eating or sleeping, preparing to eat or sleep?) and, in another, with a devastating slowness. Each of her nine guest rooms forms the center of someone’s life, her boarders caged behind the doors in their attitudes of loneliness and anxiety, boredom or melancholy or occasional elation. Logan wears his pajamas constantly, alone or under his oversized jacket and pants: the better, he declares, to nap or rise without missing a minute. With the time he saves, he means to write an epic poem celebrating his father’s role in the Civil War. Farther down the hall Tillie lies flat, thinking optimistically of the children she’ll have, the home she’ll make, the man who’ll find her when she recovers and for whose sake she’s drenched herself in expensive wrinkle cream. On either side of her Niles and Celine, inseparable over the summer but now estranged, listen tensely for each other’s footsteps but instead hear Meg, across from them—Meg, who speaks excellent French, but spends too much time in the bathroom she shares with Julie and Corinne. Below them Ezra reads illicitly: a long account of the Irish problem, which exactly as Dr. Davis warned has upset him. This, he thinks, closing the book, is why we’re forbidden to read during rest hours. But who could rest with the noise upstairs, the footsteps tapping across the hall and the water running?

  Martin, Elizabeth thinks, approaching the door of her sister’s house. Let Martin be sleeping through these hours, dreaming of Daisietta. How she hopes he is still asleep.

  Inside the cottage—too many bodies, too much noise; she loves everyone here, but the bustle still stuns her—she tries to respond with proper enthusiasm to her family’s greetings. Her three tall, fleshy nieces, and the two nephews who tower even over Michael: a race of giants, amazing to her. One is musical, two are wickedly funny, all are as smart as their grandparents. She likes best the youngest, nine-year-old Eudora, the one grandchild Nora didn’t live to see but whose expressions nonetheless often remind Elizabeth sharply of her dead friend.

  “Look at my drawings,” Eudora says, tugging at Elizabeth’s hand. A blue bird, a yellow bird, three of the dogs curled up together, the front porch of the inn. “This is the best,” she says, pushing forward her latest work: Dido asleep, one paw sheltering her gray nose.

  “Very nice,” says Elizabeth. She spends a few minutes examining Eudora’s efforts and then admires her nephews’ carved duck decoys and a dress her older niece is making. Finally her sister says, “Don’t torment your aunt,” and pulls Elizabeth into the kitchen.

  “Don’t these look good?” Gillian says proudly. “Would you like to take one back?”

  On the counter are two more of the meat pies Elizabeth saw at Ned’s, along with loaves of bread and trays of roasted squash and onions. “They smell delicious,” Elizabeth says. “But everything’s all planned for supper back at the house.”

  “Such a surprise,” Gillian says, with affectionate mockery. Elizabeth returns her smile, thinking what a pair she and her sister are. Both of them so competent, such excellent cooks and household managers. When they were young, they’d thought themselves so different from each other.

  “How did Ned seem to you?” Gillian asks.

  “All right. A bit frail, the way he has been lately. And his hands are certainly no better.”

  For a few minutes they discuss their aging relative thoughtfully. Although they’ve grown apart some over the years, they still have in common Ned, the details of keeping house for so many people, the children. And of course Michael. One of the children, Elizabeth knows, will already have skipped to the shed behind the cottage, where Michael runs the business that used to be Ned’s. Michael will be setting down his draw-shave now, lifting his bulky body from the wooden stool, and moving calmly toward the kitchen. That noise at the back door is him, kicking the snow from his boots. One more thump and here he is. He clasps Elizabeth’s hand and touches his massive cheek to hers.

  “I just wanted to say hello,” she says. If she could reach through his skin, she might find Nora inside. “And to see how the children are.”

  “In excellent shape,” Michael says, stepping back to look over at his brood. “As you see.” While a black and white cat with pearl-gray eyes twines among everyone’s legs, he adds, “Won’t you stay for supper?”

  “I can’t,” Elizabeth says. “It’s three-thirty, I need to hurry back.”

  The rigid schedule at the boardinghouse, Elizabeth’s inflexible, invariable duties there, have never made an impression on Michael. What his mother did, he once said—not in the least meaning to be insulting—had been the practice of healing. Whereas what Elizabeth does is, in his eyes, no more than keeping house. How difficult can it be?

  He has no idea, Elizabeth thinks, amazed again at what she’d once felt for him. He is nothing like Andrew, who, whatever his quirks, has always understood her devotion to the house and its constantly changing population. Andrew will be rising now, she thinks: stretching after his afternoon nap, ready to resume his duties. And in fact he’s doing almost exactly what she envisions.

  Two miles away, in the pleasant room at the back of their house, Andrew slips on a shirt, which he leaves unbuttoned, ignores the socks Elizabeth laid out for him, and then steps outside through the French doors and begins his afternoon exercises. Twenty deep knee bends, his arms straight out and his hamstrings burning. Windmills, touching right hand to left toe, left hand to right, straightening vigorously in between with a great whooshing exhalation. Sit-ups, jumping jacks, several minutes with the jump rope; he’s breathing hard, his lungs strong and elastic and a healthy sweat, a useful sweat pouring down his temples—oh, the air is gorgeous today, the fragrance is like burying his face in a bed of balsam needles. Counting ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR, he thinks of all the afternoons he’s exercised in this handsome setting. And of the invisible line, a few feet to his right, that separates the bit of ground before his French doors from that in front of the doors to the nurse’s room.

  During Mrs. Temple’s tenure, and also Mrs. MacDonald’s, he was careful not to cross that line: he might have seen inside the room inadvertently, or they might have looked out at the birds and trees and been disturbed by the sight of his prancing. In this house, so packed with people, everyone’s careful to guard each other’s privacy. Yet Nora, so private in other ways, was the one who most often broke through his caution. She seemed to sense his movements, even when she couldn’t see him; as he finished the last of his exercises she’d rise from her reading chair, tap on the glass, and wave as he stepped into view. Sometimes she’d ask him in for a minute, before they both returned to the duties of the day.

  She might tell him, then, about a new remedy she was concocting. He might describe something interesting he’d seen, or confide some worry. Once he told her about a swimming companion who complained, weeks after they’d spent an afternoon splashing in an isolated stream, that he could hear frogs croaking in his stomach. They’d seen
frog spawn, Andrew explained—he hadn’t mentioned this to Elizabeth, for fear that she might laugh at him—floating in the brook. His friend believed that he’d swallowed some, which in his stomach had hatched and, after dining greedily on his own food, metamorphosed into frogs. “Can he get them out?” Andrew said.

  Nora, listening attentively, asked a few more questions and then replied that in Ireland, where she’d grown up, people took it for granted that toads and frogs might live inside a person. “Once,” she said, “I saw a man vomit a live toad after drinking one of my grandmother’s herbal infusions. Wait here for a minute.” While he sat gazing into the fire, she gathered leaves and powders from her stock in the attic and bound the mixture into a square of white muslin. Soon after Andrew gave this to his friend, the croakings vanished and he was cured.

  The truth, Andrew thinks now, breathing hard and bending at the waist, is that they never saw the frogs expelled; perhaps they slipped out while his friend was asleep. But what matters is that his friend got better, not how Nora did it. So sharply does he miss those brief, private conversations, from which he always emerged restored, that he wonders how Elizabeth, whose friendship with Nora was both older and deeper, lives without her.

  As Elizabeth, at the cottage on the lake, kisses Nora’s grandchildren good-bye and accepts the pencil Eudora offers her, Andrew folds his jump rope and strides toward the trees, wanting a better view of Martin’s porch. Why not, it suddenly strikes him—why not run a strand of wire around the entire frame? He could fix magnets to either end so the wind, blowing down from the hill past the stand of sugar maples and through the screen, would carry healing waves directly to Martin’s bed. The magnetized chimney on one side of him, a magnetized porch frame on the other—perfect. He’ll do this tomorrow.