by Abi Maxwell
In anticipation of my absence and her solitude, she had, by that time, separated the Highland house into two apartments. It was a rather simple construction. The upstairs she now rented out to a young couple who had just come to the area, and the downstairs she reserved for herself. Signe went in, and I followed. There was a path of water from the doorstep across to the kitchen sink and then into the bathroom. Yet more shocking than that carelessness was the clothing—every last garment that Signe owned had been scattered about the apartment. All of it, the couch and chairs and dining room table, was covered in her slim dresses, her long, pleated skirts, and her organdy blouses. Even her evening gown, a stunning dress of chiffon that she had sewn but never worn, was thrown on the table. Her bed was also covered, and upon it my soaking aunt lay. Her mouth hung open. She had already fallen asleep. Gently I removed her wet clothes and covered her with a blanket from the closet. She didn’t rise for another three days. In this time I stayed with her, slept next to her on the bed, fed her. And, once, when I went out to set the trash on the curb, rather than going back into her house I climbed up the wooden stairs they had built as an entrance to the upstairs apartment and knocked on the door. A young woman answered; she must have been a year or two older than I. Her hair was dyed a bright blond, and she held a baby in her arms. She had a wonderfully unsure smile, as if she thought she ought to be happy, but wasn’t quite positive about why. I told her that I just wanted to introduce myself, that I had lived in that house all my life, that I was grateful to meet her. She must have taken me for Signe’s daughter, for she said, “I have met Alexander this past weekend. Is he your father?”
When Signe finally woke and sat up, I mustered the courage to ask her if Alex had indeed come to see her.
“Oh, yes,” she said. She said it as though it was the plainest occurrence in the world.
My aunt could have died out there in the lake; I felt I had no choice but to be blunt. “Signe,” I asked, “did he break your heart?”
To my question she laughed a long, uncontrollable laugh. For a moment I felt she was mocking me, yet her laughter was much too true for that. “Oh,” she finally said. “It was the brandy that has done it.” After that she simply stood up, crossed the room, and went to the bathroom. There she drew herself a bath. When that was finished, she began to sing a loud Swedish country song, and she put a blue, flowing, water-like dress on. She walked about the house as though it was Sunday and she had not a care in the world. Never again did she mention that weekend.
Yet she did take to saying, now and then, “It was the brandy that has done it.” She said this at odd, exhausted, happy times, and in my small understanding of her, I believed she had gone a bit crazy. For she had changed. Become, in a sense, freer, looser, her motions now sweeping and her laughter unkempt. I believed it was my aunt’s only way of coping. I knew her rules. Signe took only one swig of brandy at a time, either to calm her nerves or to put herself to sleep. She was not a woman to alter her own rules. That man had forced her, I decided. Alexander McCaffrey had forced my dear aunt.
That year, on a Friday afternoon after my courses in Boston, I boarded a trolley and rode over to the Pierce building. Just as Signe had walked up and down that street, I now paced there like an obsessed woman. When the bell struck to mark an hour’s time passing, I entered the building. I had practiced what I would say. I told the woman working the front desk that I would like to speak with Alexander McCaffrey. As she flipped through a circular address reel, I became sure that she would say no man of such a name worked there. Yet she gave me directions to his cubby. It wasn’t but two doors down the hallway. He would be in the fifth desk on the right. “It’s the man who takes the orders from Kettleborough, New Hampshire?” I asked. She assured me that it was.
In that hallway I lost what I would say, and I went back out again for fresh air. In winter, in our part of the country, a gray darkness settles early upon us. In that darkness, with the voices of the people passing before me somehow distant, I suddenly thought of Hjalmar. To die alone in this cold place, I thought. As it turned out, Hjalmar had died of cold, as Signe had worried he would. I learned this when, as Signe had said, I was old enough to not frighten myself with it. I also learned that when he had lost his apartment she had in fact asked him to live with us, and she had also given him a fair amount of money, both of which he had refused. That coat, I recalled when Signe told me the story, could have saved his life. Yet to regret giving it was something I was sure Hjalmar never did.
I walked back into that building. I tapped the man’s shoulder, and asked him if he truly was Alexander McCaffrey. He had a head of soft, neatly brushed hair, and his fingers were long. The nails, I noticed, were clean and well cut. His top lip, which I imagined would be nothing more than a cliff that dropped sharply into his mouth, was round and full and deeply cleft. That face: he could have been a boy. He stared up at me as if he had been caught. How I must have scared that poor man. His secret was revealed, he must have thought with a terror. For the truth, I would learn, was simple: Alexander McCaffrey was a gay man, and only my aunt Signe knew.
“I know what you have done to my poor aunt,” I said with conviction. And Alex, of course he lied.
“Signe?” he said. “I do not know a Signe. Kettleborough? No, I’ve never been there.”
His bottom lip slipped into his mouth and he sucked on it the way a baby might. Any passerby would have known he was lying. Yet I could say nothing in reply.
In her last years, we packed Signe’s things and moved her into my family’s house on the hill. On good days she turned opera on in the kitchen and walked from room to room with her arms waving, as though from her own limbs the sounds came forth. On neutral days she read, and there were not many bad days, even at the very end. Into our house, along with her bags, I had also carried the bravery to bare all I could to Signe before she died, and to ask for all I wanted. What happened? I asked her one day, as she sat in her living room chair, her eyes open wide to the sunlight that poured in upon her. What I meant to ask was what had happened on that day that she had drifted so far out in the lake. What happened with Alexander to cause her to do that, I wanted to know.
“My heavenly days,” she said. The words rolled fully from her lips. She clapped her hands together and I knew that in her mind she was drifting far away. “Go to the drawer,” she said after some time. I knew which drawer she meant; it was in one of the only pieces of furniture she had brought in the move, and it was where the catalog had been kept. “An envelope,” she said. “March fourteen I believe it says.” That date was my aunt’s birthday. It took me a while to find the envelope. I had to pull the drawer out from the table and empty its contents one at a time. There were shoelaces and pens, old photographs, a protractor. Tucked into the first page of the S.S. Pierce & Company catalog is where I found the envelope. It didn’t say March 14. Rather, Signe had written in careful handwriting, On my 60th birthday. I brought it to her. She was in her mid-eighties now, her hands shaky and her dark veins showing through her thin, aged skin. I had to help her open the envelope. A newspaper article was tucked inside. The ink smudged on her fingers and when she wiped at her hair she left a black streak on her forehead. The article was about Alexander. On her sixtieth birthday Signe had gone, she told me, down to Boston to see her friend. She had imagined it as a surprise gift, for after he told her his secret, they had made a pact to not speak again. It wasn’t shame, she said, but some sort of horror. Some acceptance of the long, lonely life to come. “We had simply understood,” she said. “It seemed the way it had to be.” Yet after nearly twenty years of honoring that pact, on that birthday Signe gathered her courage. As she walked toward S.S. Pierce she imagined the way they would talk. How they would laugh, eat a long, slow dinner. They would look back upon their lives, the way they had turned out, not so bad at all. It wasn’t until she made her way over to the Pierce building that she looked at the newspaper. Alexander McCaffrey had fallen into the Boston channel, and af
ter a week his body had been found and identified. “He fell,” the witness had insisted. “Sure as day that man fell.”
“With that secret,” my aunt said now, “you do not fall into the channel.”
It took me some time to understand what she was telling me. When I finally grasped it I went on. I said, “Can you imagine? Can you imagine knowing, your entire life, that you would fit nowhere? That you had no one to tell your secret to?” For though by this time the troubles of my life had seemed insurmountable, hearing Alex’s story somehow pulled me out. I had given and received love, after all.
“Why yes,” my aunt said. She sounded both forceful and astonished. “Yes,” she said, “I can understand perfectly well what Alexander McCaffrey went through.” She held out her hand for me to return the newspaper clipping. She was angry. Which, for my dim-wittedness, she had every right to be. She must have thought that I knew—always had known—and respected her own secret. She must have felt as I did—that we two knew each other as well as any two people could. But all those years, I had failed to understand that she herself was a gay woman. “I can understand every last bit of it,” she said sharply.
I never did find out what exactly my aunt meant to do on that day in the lake. For years I supposed that after her time with Alexander she had simply stood on the pier and allowed her mind to go blank, and that in that state she had been called back to that island she had come from. Though I have never acted upon it, that is what I have felt many times as I look out toward Bear Island, that wild and solitary place.
For her death, I dressed Signe in an ivory-colored organza gown with sleeves that would flutter. I pinned flowers at her waist. For a ball, tea, maybe a wedding, Signe had said when she sewed that dress. She never completed it; I found it at the back of her closet, and it was I who made the final stitches.
“She lived a long life,” the librarian said as we stood together outside the small church after Signe’s funeral. She wrapped her arms tightly around me. “Thank God for that,” she said. “Thank God she never did go through with it.”
Then she told me that Alexander and Signe had eaten a wonderful dinner together when he finally did visit, and together they shared a bottle of brandy. For two nights they slept beside each other on Signe’s bed. In a way it was the brandy that had done it, for it allowed them to expose themselves. When Alexander boarded the train, it was down that long track that my aunt looked, and what she saw was the endless stretch of her lonely life. She hadn’t been called to the island. Instead, she had been called to the shore, down by the town docks, where old rope and rocks were piled. My aunt wrapped the rocks with that old rope. Next she tied the rope around her ankles. I don’t know how far she made it out into the water in this way. I don’t know if the knots were poorly tied or the rope too loose, or if a sweep of something greater than herself came across her mind to make her reach under and untie those rocks. But she did, and once they dropped to the floor of our lake my aunt rose, gasping, and it was her rising that the librarian witnessed. She tried to call Signe in but she would not come. Did my aunt mean to continue with her plan, to drift out and die simply in the middle of the lake? I wonder that sometimes, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the sun suddenly, impossibly, burst forth above that big mountain far away, that it and the lake embraced my aunt, and that my aunt swam home.
Hush
1958
OH GLORY BE, Sophie thought on September 16, 1958, when her son brought the infant home. This small being, the world is good. She held the baby to her chest and ran a soft finger down the stretch of her forehead, along the ridge of her nose, and then, knowing it would comfort her son, she handed that gleaming new body back to him. Without the baby in her arms Sophie’s hands gripped the porcelain sink once more. Behind her, her husband sat slumped at the kitchen table, his cheek right there against the maple, not even his arms to shield himself.
“My heavenly days,” she said softly, her vision cast out the window. There were turkeys out there, one mother with eight little ones in tow. When the mother perched on the stone wall, one by one the others did the same, and when Malcolm looked out the window he saw all the turkeys sitting at ease, sunning themselves on the Wickholm land. It wasn’t until a car crested the driveway and the turkeys skittered away that Sophie turned to her thirteen-year-old son and asked, “Malcolm, whose baby have you got?”
She might have been asking him what picture show he’d seen that week, for her words came out that unremarkably. As did this: “Malcolm, your brother is dead.”
Once she’d said it, Sophie sat down, took one long, deep breath, straightened her back, and clasped her hands together in her lap. Her Karl. He had worked for two years to save for that Ford that he had bought himself, and then he had driven the Ford for one year, and then he had rounded a corner too fast on wet leaves and hit a tree and died. Malcolm said nothing. He simply lifted the infant higher on his shoulder, patted her back, and carried her up the stairs. In his bedroom he made a bed of blankets on the hardwood floor. He laid her down and began to sing, “Row, row, row your boat.” His voice cracked and teetered. The baby was sleeping, had been since the moment he found her, perhaps one hour ago. With nothing left to do for her, Malcolm walked down the stairs, but seeing neighbors with casseroles, he walked back up, and seeing the baby still sleeping, he walked back down, and in this manner he passed the rest of the day, and most of the next.
It would be another few years before Aunt Signe sold her own home and moved in with her niece, but in the days after Karl’s death she came each day to see that life in the Wickholm house continued to move forward. Despite the fact that she was so old that her back hunched when she walked and her arms shook when she lifted anything, it was Aunt Signe who went to the store for formula and bottles, and she who went to the attic to find the cloth diapers that Sophie’s own children had worn. It was also Aunt Signe who said to Sophie’s husband, “Otto, you know where that baby came from.”
The boathouse, that was the answer Malcolm had given. Originally it had just been a shed built over the water, a place for Otto to store his motorboat and, eventually, Malcolm’s canoe. But a few years back Otto had followed the pattern of so many others in town and had a second level built above the first, which he rented out as an apartment. The baby, Malcolm said, had been in the lower level, in the floating canoe. He said it was a miracle clear as day that she hadn’t been tossed into the whitecapped water. When he said this Sophie went to him, patted his hair, and told him she agreed.
Otto didn’t say a word, not to Signe and not to anyone else. Instead, in his own way, he went a little mad. In response to Signe’s statement he walked out of the house and down to his shop in town, where he made and sold ice cream, as his father and grandfather had. He spent the night there, and many more after that. On the first night he made more ice cream than he had ever made before—one hundred gallons; he simply started with it and could not stop. After that he took a rest on the cement floor and then he began again, making and freezing ice cream and making and freezing more. He would never be able to sell it all, and he was already running out of room to store it. Still he kept on, and on the rare occasions that he did return home, he kept his eyes averted from the baby. It wasn’t difficult to do, because each time he entered the house Sophie or Malcolm would scoot that baby right up the stairs, out of sight.
Aunt Signe washed and pressed the laundry, cleaned the house, cooked the food, and tended to the bills. And, more than once, she said to her niece, “I should expect you intend to claim that child.”
At first, Sophie, like her husband, gave no response. One time she said yes. The final time, though, she kept her eyes fixed out the window, on those turkeys in the yard, as she said to her aunt that they both knew the sort of husband Sophie had chosen. “But Otto is a good man,” she said lightly.
And Otto was good, or at least he firmly meant to be. But he had been raised in a certain way; his mind had formed in a certain way. Thing
s were right or things were wrong and if he could not decide which it was, he figured he’d best do away with it. In town he kept watch in the papers and listened on the streets and in the post office, trying to see if anyone knew about the baby. He heard nothing, and at times he wondered if perhaps it could just continue in this secret way. So he would let his wife have what she wanted. He could just stay away. Because to speak up—no, look at the life he had built, the values he stood for. But to take the baby from her, surely that would break his dear Sophie in half.
The Wickholms’ house sat on the top of the hill, higher than any other in Kettleborough, with a grand view of the lake below. The only thing that obstructed the view was the Randolph house and the clump of pines on the Randolph land. Otto had wanted those trees cut down. He had even offered to pay for the job to be done, but Mrs. Randolph had sent her oldest son up to their house to tell them no. “They’re Mother’s favorites,” the boy had stood on the porch repeating as though it were the only sentence he knew. Now Otto walked past those trees, past that house with its paint peeling and its lawn overgrown and its yard so overrun with junk that it could be taken for the dump itself, past Mrs. Randolph, who sat glued, as always, to her rocking chair on the porch. He kept his shoulders high, his eyes pointed toward his own tall white home, just ten or so yards above.
“Evening, Otto!” Mrs. Randolph hollered, as she always did.
Otto tipped his head in her direction. Typically that marked the end of the interchange. But now she whistled to him and called out, “Not so fast.” As usual, she had that telephone in her lap, that long, curly cord stretched out from her kitchen. That Mrs. Randolph passed the day away by listening in on neighbors’ phone calls was no secret.
