Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  And then, just as it had for Doctor Warren and his wife, what came was a single miracle child when he was forty-eight and Estelle five years younger—both well past the point of even the remotest hope. When in fact both were in the flush of having brought peace to their union and were not only content but sometimes watching parents struggling with their children and he so well acquainted with the frights, the terrors that children produced for parents, both somewhat relieved to be freed from all that. And then one evening in the quiet of their own room she turned to him and told him and even as she spoke all the chips and cogs of misstep and hesitation and oddity of the past weeks fell into place for him and he stood silent watching his wife until she laughed and told him his mouth was a flytrap.

  Alexandra they named her. And that July morning when he wandered the grounds in his silent opening of the day he heard her piped five-year-old voice chasing after him, coming up from the gardens, calling him because she alone among the women rose early like himself. He turned his eyes from the splendor of the lake below and walked to the gate that led into the garden and waited. He did not open the gate but watched her, running up through the dew-wet grass, holding something, her hands cupped out before her, her legs long and feet bare and her hair light blond loose about her face as she ran to him, carrying some treasure, some discovery, some new bit or piece of the world that she was learning and still believed or behaved as if it had been fresh-made, as if the world had sprung into being for her alone. She’d seen him at the gate and cried, “Papa!”

  Jonathon stood with his hands loose upon the picket tops of the gate watching her come and he could almost believe that she was correct; this ancient earth had been waiting all along for this creature to inhabit it. Now he could smell bacon and coffee and knew it would not be long, ten minutes perhaps before through a window Estelle would spy them and call for breakfast and he would sit once more across from the old woman and chat with his wife and wipe jam from his daughter’s face. So he swung open the gate and went down on one knee, slowly, feeling the grit of his age in his joints and was swept with sadness—the almost certain knowledge that while he might live to see his child’s children all odds were against it. He held himself steady with one hand on the gatepost until she was close and then flexed the muscles in his legs and opened both his arms toward her pell-mell run and said, “What is it, Xandra? What’ve you found?”

  What she loved about the house were the windows. Great broad tall double hung windows that lined each room, each floor, that could be flung open to the summer air so that the house seemed nearly to float or, in cold or wet weather could be closed and she could stand and watch the weather just beyond the glass, often sliding down against that glass. The windows to her were the heart of the house and so seemed to her an ample and unchanging extension of her husband—the same lightness and security he took her into that first wet-soaked night years before when she opened her eyes and saw him leaning over her and knew she could entrust herself to him entirely. She did not consider herself fortunate or that it was luck; neither did she feel she’d earned it but simply that it came to her as a simple and extraordinary gift. As if the world had opened an otherwise closed hand and revealed itself to her. It was some time before she fully understood that her husband felt the same way—a solitary man eighteen years older than she whom the ladies of the town had given up for bachelorhood.

  Perhaps it was the afternoon that he drove her out from their rented lodging in the town up onto the hillside where for an entire spring and summer men had been working to build this house, a house she knew nothing of until she first saw it that early autumn day. Just two years after meeting him. Married twenty-one of the months of those years. And through that spring and summer he’d kept the building of the house secret from her. So they rode up in his doctor’s buggy and she saw the house rising out of the raw ground and what she saw first was not the view or the size of the house or the rudely laid-out gardens and raw plantings but the windows. She had a moment while the buggy was still moving where she wondered if she’d complained too much of the darkness of their rented lodging and then knew it was not so—that he simply knew she needed windows the same way he seemed to know everything else she needed. Not a bit of this did he feel obligated to provide. But rather offered to her because each knew that the accident that brought them together was too precious to ever be ignored. That both sought each in their own way, always, to honor. Life, they both knew, was accidental and fragile and delicate as breath. So he gave her windows. The house just a place to hold them. Before her feet were even on the ground she knew this. When she turned and met his gaze and the droopy smile that was his for her alone she had said, “Don’t let them put shutters on.”

  And he had said, “There are none planned.”

  Years later after her daughter was born and she watched the child grow she made a determination, when Estelle was three, perhaps four, to allow her girl to grow up with as much freedom as possible, to abandon the notions of the times—of constraint and overbearing supervision—children as household creatures almost—and allow her the independence of her own mind. She insisted only on two things—education and manners. And even these she allowed the child to discover on her own as much as possible. Largely she was pleased with the results. It did not hurt, and she admitted this to herself, that Estelle was curious and cautious at once, that the girl’s own nature seemed to preclude fashion or any overt fascination with decorum but was a proud bold girl of independent but not flaunting mind. She watched her daughter and wondered how much of this was her method of raising and how much just the nature of the girl. Oftentimes, watching her daughter grow to a woman, she could not help but wonder how different they truly were. If her own circumstances had allowed would she have been as wise as her child. She liked to think so. She believed her child was in a way a lovely second chance for her own life.

  She knew Estelle would marry the young surgeon returned from the war before her daughter knew this. It was not, as she knew he believed, that she disliked him. It was that she distrusted other people and was honest enough to admit to herself that it was from fear of being found out—of being unearthed as the uneducated backward woman she believed herself to be. That at the pit of her soul she knew herself to be. She had entrusted herself to her husband and only to him. She could not do it again with another man, ever, in any way. It wasn’t scorn she feared so much as having that pit opened wide within herself and taking her over. Which she always, each day of her life, feared might happen. She knew her will—and knew that will was not always enough safeguard against the mysterious workings of the world.

  And yet the rot seemed to work within her anyway. She knew Jonathon Astor to be a good man and yet could not but keep him at a distance and within that distance she saw she diminished him. But she could not explain herself to him. She wished he understood her silence. But it was not something once in place to breach. Not some idle summer afternoon, not ever. If I could write, she thought, I’d leave him a letter for after my death. But it was not a letter she could dictate to anyone. Not even perhaps thoughts that could be arranged beyond the stream of emotional flow. So, she thought, he will never know. A thought largely free of distress. Most of life consists of not-knowing.

  And then finally there came her granddaughter. So late as to be given up for by all as her own daughter had been. And who was the very image of her own mother. As she’d never seen or even guessed that her mother might’ve once been. But was unmistakable in the child. And again she thought I’ve been given something here. Something I never even thought I wanted and nothing that can be shared. For there was no one to share it with and no reason to do so. But still a gift. As if life would not quit but insisted on informing her over and again that whatever form she thought was settled upon was only one quivering instance, true and intact but merely a moment before another truth asserted itself. A blond-haired child with those wide and deep pale blue eyes, lashes so fine as to not exist at all. The past then w
as not passed and life not a line but a circle, one far wider and deeper than the simple round of birth to death. She loved this child and the child was also a torment to her memory.

  And because of all this she recalled that man who allowed torment to eat all but the final hard stone of his soul. She held no regret for his death. But after so many years forgave him for the deaths of the others, his own children. She slept little these late days and often times in the small hours would let herself quiet from the house to go into the gardens under starlight and gaze down at the breadth of lake and allow herself those few tears that remained to her. She was not embarrassed by their scarcity—they were an abundance to her, each one rolling slow seeping from her eyes was a bound-up fullness of all of her. It was a lovely thing. And at that hour nothing she had to fear explaining to any other person. Tears for the dead. Tears for the long-gone.

  July afternoon, late day with the sun still high. Seated in the deep shade of the porch that ran across the back of the house looking out over the flowerbeds and rose gardens and arbors and terraces, the hammock strung between sturdy English walnuts, the croquet course laid in a flat area of close trimmed lawn, the hoops and flags slight wavering beckonings for the temporarily suspended game. Below there, out of sight was the vegetable garden. There were a pair of men who came weekly to tend the yards and flowers, another who daily not only took care of the carriage barn and horses and equipment but who just in the last two years had been assigned the vegetable garden. When she could no longer do the work, even the simplest of weeding and harvesting. She was dependent now completely on others. Who did not do things quite as she liked but close enough so she held back her sighs. The cost of age. Seventy-four years old. But she was not helpless.

  On her lap a wide shallow basket. On the porch floor a deeper basket. Nested in the basket on her lap was a bowl. She was shucking peas. Lifting the fat pods one at a time from the lap basket and splitting the pod with her thumbnail and raking out the peas into the bowl and then with a slight lift that twitched in her lower back each time dropping the empty pod into the basket on the floor. English peas although no one called them that anymore. They had varietal names she could never keep track of. It didn’t matter. The world changed. She still feared the gas lamps that burned clean and radiant at night. She missed her chamber pot. Thought it unnatural to walk in light from her bedroom in her nightgown to the bathroom down the hall. The world was new. She was shucking peas. It was the same old world. Her granddaughter sat in the porch swing watching her.

  “Nonnie?” The voice the hope of girlhood.

  “Alexandra?” Looking up from the peas, letting her hands rest on the sides of the basket.

  “Sammie in the barn had kittens.”

  “Did she?”

  “She did. Five.” The girl paused and then rushed into it. “I was thinking I’d like one for my own. My very own.”

  “Well now. I’d think you’d have to ask your mother.” Knowing where this was going.

  “I already did.”

  “And?”

  “She said barn cats are for the barn. They keep the mice down. She said a kitten in the house would just want to keep going back to the barn and that I should just play with them out there.”

  The old woman nodded. She said, “Wouldn’t that be enough?”

  “Oh Nonnie. I want one all for my own. It wouldn’t want to go back to the barn. Not if it lived with me. And I’d take care of it, I would.”

  “You told your mother that?”

  “I did. But she said she wasn’t sure I was old enough. But I am. I am.”

  “Umm.” The old woman was silent and the little girl was also, waiting, knowing what hung in the balance of that silence. After a bit the woman prodded her hand in the remaining peas and studied them. Then she looked up at the girl.

  She said, “Do you have one picked out special?”

  The girl squirmed on the swing and it rocked gently. “I think so. There’s two I like for sure.”

  “Well now. It has to be a special one. One that you take into your heart. Maybe you should go play with them and see if either one strikes you that way.”

  The girl came off the swing and stood before her grandmother. “And Mama?”

  The woman nodded. “She has the last say. But I’ll talk to her.”

  The little girl turned and ran down the steps onto the lawn, cutting to run around the side of the house to the gate that opened onto the drive and the barn beyond. Floating back came her voice. “Thank you, Nonnie.”

  Out loud, but far from the girl’s hearing the woman said, “A little girl should have a kitten.”

  She sat a time still resting. Such labor, those peas. Take me quick was what she thought. Not to linger. Another year at most if she kept failing like this. Her desire such a puny thing before whatever design was assigned to her. She wished she had more courage. The courage to face boldly whatever it was came her way. To not fear it if it happened to be long slow years of enfeeblement. And then realized she did have that courage. Just because it wasn’t what she wanted didn’t mean she couldn’t turn her face directly into it if that’s what was called for.

  She’d ridden five days and nights without stopping except to water the horse and drink herself although it was a terrible job getting off and on the horse and times she’d pause to let the horse crop late-season grass but she refused to stop, to talk with people, to buy food. Something in her back was wrong from when she’d been knocked flat and breathless. It hurt to ride but the idea of stopping was worse and so she did not halt but let the big bay horse find the way and when she did stop for water the horse seemed to know she was his charge and so would stand easy while she fought to remount. At night working their way slowly along roads through the dark with dogs coming from farmyards to howl their passing and days also they went slow as she felt the horse slowly failing beneath her but he’d stopped eating as if his own memory prodded him on. South and westward across Vermont and then crossing into New York State near Whitehall and through the rough farmland little better than where she’d come from and then out into the broad wide valley of the Mohawk, following that river and then south and west again onto the turnpike running alongside the Canal. At dusk on the fifth day in a rainstorm she came into the streets of Geneva with her vision fluttering and the horse also fluttering each step forward and she recalled people stepping away from her as she came on, recalled watching them and wondering what was the matter with them and then she went down. Or the horse went down. Or both together. Later, she liked to think it was both together, that they crumbled at the same time.

  Later, when she was awake again, under the care of the man she would marry sooner than she would’ve believed at the time, she asked about the horse and was told it had died. It was with this news that she pushed up in the bed against the pain that encased her as a sheath and told this quiet kind man everything about herself she would ever tell another soul. Which was not all, not quite, but all she would give of herself to another. And he stood listening to her, not insisting she lie back, or rest, or wait, or any of the platitudes he might’ve offered but instead listened to her telling as if he knew it was the only time he would hear even this much. When she was done she slept three days and when she woke recalled her telling and watched him as he tended her to see if he would raise the questions he might have, that he must have. But he did not. She knew it had not been a fever-dream. And so came the first understanding of the trust that would absorb her as certainly as the pain had so recently. That she would give herself over to. Because it was either that or keep riding and she’d ridden one horse to death and would not do the same to another. At the time she thought There’s an abundance of ways that life settles itself. She had never changed her mind about that.

  So. A girl would have a kitten. She could do that much. She rocked in her porch chair a bit, her gaze soft off into the July afternoon. Just late enough so the shadows from the house and trees were beginning to spread out. Still hot but
there was a breeze and she was comfortable. She thought I will not flinch, not before anything. She regarded the basket of peas. Half-done. Half to be shelled. Sweet new peas for dinner. She could smell a chicken roasting, the smell lifting from her lovely windows. She held plentitude. But the work before her. She lifted her hands from the basket-edge and studied them. Old spotted hands worn thin like winter stems. The one with the hard purple scar across the palm and insides of its fingers. The other just an old hand. She buried them back into the peas and let them rest there a moment. A job to be done. She took up a pod and split it and raked out the peas into the bowl, discarded the casing and then dipped her hands again for another pod. Her hands found the rhythm. She lifted her eyes from the job. A soft gaze far out beyond the gardens. Her hands did not need her eyes. Her eyes could see anything they wanted to. Her hands knew the work. They went on.