Painting the Light

by Sally Cabot Gunning

  And Ezra was charming. Ida had met him at a schoolmate’s wedding and had noticed his taking her in from top to bottom: hair swept high and loose in keeping with the current fashion, mourning silk enlivened with French lace collar and cuffs, her mother’s diamond and pearl encrusted locket hanging between her breasts. At the time Ida had believed it was her face and figure that had captured Ezra’s eye; later she suspected that in fact it had been the locket. But when Ida intercepted that look of appreciation she’d felt a little spark of life for the first time since she’d lost her family; she smiled, and that was all it took to draw Ezra across the room to her. And, she would admit it, Ida had liked the look of him too: the well-cut suit, the strong shoulders, the confident smile. And she’d liked it even more that he’d apparently asked around about her and knew of her tragedy yet refused to tiptoe around it as if it were contagious. “Are you truly all alone now?” he’d asked. “There’s no family left at all?”

  Later in their acquaintance, after he’d discovered she was an artist, Ezra had talked of his island home as an enchanted place; he’d described a rising tide of affluent tourists always on the lookout for art, an acclaimed summer institute that offered classes in the arts, more flowers than she could paint in a lifetime. But more important than all of that, Ezra was a man of the land. A sheep farmer. A man who would never be swallowed by the sea. And perhaps there lay the greatest evidence of Ezra’s charm: the fact that he’d managed to talk Ida into island life, that a woman who abhorred the idea of water now lived surrounded by it. But when Ezra showed her his Martha’s Vineyard farm—the rolling green hills dotted with sheep, the water at a picturesque distance, a late-day glow pinking the stone walls, she’d thought: peace.

  When had that peace washed away? Perhaps when Ezra and Mose started the salvage business that would not only take them to sea but to “meetings” at Duffy’s at every odd hour. Perhaps when Ezra leased office space in Boston that seemed to serve more as an excuse to leave the island at will and without warning. Or perhaps, more simply, when he stopped trying to charm her. However it happened, one day Ida woke from her long fog of grief to find that the island tourists were looking for island landscapes, not portraits and still lifes; that the famed institute was nothing but a summer school for teachers; that the flowers growing wild along the road and in the meadows drooped thinly when imprisoned in a vase; that most months of the year the water and sky and even the farm itself pressed in and down and around Ida like a grave; that she was trapped in a life that she could never claim as hers and from which she could never escape.

  And now Ezra was dead. An unexpected wave of anger hit Ida; Ezra had drowned and left her here to sort for him among the bodies—again, a thing that wasn’t his fault, and yet somehow she could blame him for it.

  Ida clambered aboard the ferry and found a seat inside, fixing her eyes on the horizon. The surface of the sea appeared calm enough, but she could feel the swell and roll of it below, the remains of the storm washing in from farther out. Was it still washing in bodies? They’d never recovered the bodies of her father and brothers, but there were times when Ida had thought of that as a gift, especially after she saw her mother’s crab-eaten face and those stones in her pockets. For a time Ida had dreamed of her father and brothers still alive, shipwrecked on a remote barrier island, but she wanted no such fantasies with Ezra; she wanted to find his body, to bring it home, to enclose him in the ground along with this terrifying, unwelcome anger. That she should feel this, that it should rise up and wrestle down the grief she should have felt only made her angrier.

  The Woods Hole harbor, as compared to the Haven, seemed to have suffered little damage; the wood pilings on the dock stood upright, the steamship office, warehouses, and train station all possessed their original roofs; a few tall trees still hovered starkly in the background. Ida stepped gratefully onto ground that didn’t shift under her and hurried to the train station; she purchased the latest Atlantic to shield herself from unwanted conversation and secured a window seat. But as the train labored its way down the length of the Cape, she found herself ignoring the magazine and gazing out the window at flat fields, marsh, stunted black pines, ponds skimmed with ice, a bedraggled cluster of houses, and finally, the wind-blasted dunes of Wellfleet.

  At the station Ida negotiated a hack without difficulty, but as they drew closer and closer to the shore, her composure left her. It was still bitterly cold, which meant Ida would find no rotting flesh awaiting her, but she began to imagine other things that could happen to a body after it had been pummeled by the sea. She began to imagine her mother.

  The Lifesaving Station sat perched on the edge of a dune, its roof steeply pitched to deter the wind, a lookout turret standing defiantly above it. The Atlantic stretched out long and seemingly calm beyond, but Ida could hear the rumbling of surf at the foot of the bluff and wasn’t fooled. She stepped out of the carriage onto ground that now seemed as unstable as the sea and strode toward the building. The lifesaving boats were lined up outside; Ida considered why and pushed the thought aside, but inside the cavernous space it was as she’d feared—the entire floor was covered with bodies draped in blankets.

  Ida stood still and waited as three others completed a ponderous circle of the room. One couple could have been the Chilmark Hardings. A single man could have been a relative of Ira Briggs’s cousin or Bert Robinson’s niece. She didn’t want to draw too close to them, to find she was recognized, to be forced to speak, but even more, she didn’t want to get close enough to read the details of their grief. Only after they left the building, the man and woman holding each other upright, the single man striding fast, as if to outpace his disappointment, did Ida approach the surf man on duty and show him the picture of Ezra she’d brought with her.

  Ida’s single image of Ezra was one he’d commissioned for a wedding portrait: Ida sat stiffly in lilac silk, again wearing her mother’s locket; Ezra stood with a knee cocked, looking into the distance, already focused on his exit. The surf man studied the photo at length but as if out of politeness, not wishing to dismiss it without at least feigning attention; in the end he handed it back and gestured to the rows of bodies.

  “Best look for yourself, ma’am.”

  Ida began at the nearest corner and paced the rows, looking for anything of Ezra, even among the Negroes, even among the women, distrusting the sea, distrusting her senses. At first she wasn’t able to see anything; next she was able to see nothing but death. At last she was able to see this beard or that coat or a slant to a nose, but nothing she could join up to form Ezra. When she reached the end she stood and breathed to settle herself, then started again, slower this time, holding up the picture, lifting the blankets, remembering to look for Mose too, but she could make no single piece of flesh into either man. She returned to the surf man, who now stood leaning against the wall. “Are you still collecting bodies?”

  “Not since the wind shifted.”

  “How many are still missing?”

  The surf man shrugged. “Nobody knows. The passenger list was on shipboard. They’re guessing they shipped close to two hundred, it being a holiday weekend.”

  Ida made a quick survey of the room, estimating not more than forty bodies, which grew the odds against her finding Ezra. She turned and saw the driver had waited for her at the door with what appeared to be real empathy shadowing his face; he held out his arm and she took it, allowed him to walk her to the carriage. It was well beyond dark when he left her at a rooming house at the center of town that he insisted was clean and safe for women alone; he tried to refuse the money for the fare, but Ida pressed it into his hand. She was not the grieving widow he believed her to be.

  But odd as it was considering that Ezra’s wasn’t among them, seeing those rows of dead bodies in Wellfleet and hearing the groaning of the sea beyond confirmed for Ida the fact of her husband’s death. Ezra wasn’t going to walk out of that barn. He wasn’t going to walk up that hill. He wasn’t going to barge into the
kitchen with Mose, jabbering about whatever it was he chose to jabber about at the moment. He would not now, ever, age into Lem Daggett. He was dead.

  Ezra, dead. Ida got up and paced the room, repeating the words aloud: Ezra, dead. Ezra dead, waiting for that overwhelming crash of grief that she knew so well. Around and around she went, seeing nothing but the worn rug under her feet, but no matter how many turns she took she felt nothing but hollow, blank. That fact and the long night itself wore away at her in turns; she’d imagined nothing could ever be as difficult as grief until she came upon its absence.

  3

  Ida stood at the pasture fence and looked over the sheep. It was something else Lem had taught her—stand and look, get to know your flock, spy that gimpy leg or overgrown hoof or restless ewe before the leg twisted or the hoof rolled or the lamb was cast. The only trouble with sheep was that they were too stoic, Lem said; by the time they complained it was too late to do much good.

  Ida had spent enough hours at the fence by now that she knew her charges: the one she called Queen, who posed like a statue whenever she saw anyone watching; the one born with a twisted leg that ran with an odd hop; the one with the nick in her ear. Queen; Hop; Nick; those she always knew and some others besides, but even if she couldn’t name every member of the flock she could pick out the drooping head and hollow back of a sick sheep from halfway across the field. As she did now.

  It was one of the older ewes. Ida pondered whether to call Bett to cull the sick sheep from the flock but feared the dog would stress it, cause it to use up too much of its diminished strength. It stood up against the mottled stones of the wall as if to camouflage itself, and Ida determined she should be able to draw close. Ida collected Ezra’s crook and a halter, opened the gate, and walked into the pasture, setting off a chorus of noise and a parting of the sea of thick bodies as she walked. As she drew closer she noted the ewe’s sides heaved as if laboring to breathe. Ida hooked the sheep and haltered it without difficulty, led it into the barn, and called Lem.

  Ida watched Lem’s practiced hands examine the sheep, feeling for pulse and respiration, pulling back the eyelids, opening the mouth. Ida had once asked Ezra why Lem didn’t have his own sheep farm, knowing everything about sheep the way he did.

  “He had one,” Ezra had answered. “Burned to the ground one night and his wife with it. It took all the starch out of him; he never could face building again from scratch.” There Ezra had paused. “Although once he asked me did I ever think about selling this place.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I laughed and said ‘Take it!’ Told him my price. He never mentioned it again.”

  Now, Lem straightened. “This looks like pneumonia.” He fetched the hollow drench horn; Ida went inside and fetched the brandy. She filled the horn while Lem secured the sheep between his legs, then tipped its head back and funneled in the brandy. She knew the rest. Watch and wait. Either the sheep recovered or there’d be mutton for dinner.

  Ida returned to the house thinking of the calendar, of the long winter ahead, followed by the spring lambing and shearing, the summer haying and weaning, the fall breeding and livestock sale, back around again to another long winter. As absent as Ezra had come to be, he’d always made sure he was on hand for lambing, shearing, haying, the sale in October. How was Ida to manage it? Lem would do the shearing, but she’d have to find the money to pay him; she’d have to find the money to pay Bart Robinson, who harvested the hay. Come to that, she didn’t like the look of the hayloft—those sheep would eat through eight tons of hay before the grass greened again, and if she had to buy hay . . . Ida knew the farm account had been dangerously depleted when Ezra bought a prize ram in September, but it hadn’t worried him because of the Maine job, he said. The Maine job he’d never finished. But now Ida remembered hearing Mose and Ezra, sitting at the kitchen table, gleeful after the purchase of the Cormorant, making some sort of list. She’d barely listened, it not being a favorite subject, but she’d heard one particular word: insurance.

  The snowmelt caused a new problem in town; now Ida’s hem was coated in mud by the time she reached Main Street, and once again she cut down onto the beach. Some of the boats had been refloated, a couple had been left to rot, more flotsam had washed up from the wreckage, the cargo of lime still burned. The news of Ezra being aboard the Portland must have gone out; she passed a group of three men she recognized by their faces but couldn’t sort by name, and they fell silent with that awkward attention death always brought forth. As she moved on she heard the low rumble of their voices behind her, made out the words artist and gone soon, spoken in a flat tone in which Ida heard no regret.

  Ida continued up to the street, watching her footing more than the surroundings, and almost missed the fact that someone had replaced the office windowpane. Lem, she guessed. As she drew closer she could hear noise from inside: the clank of the stove door, something scraping across the floor, the ping ping ping of water dripping onto metal. She opened the door expecting to see Lem’s economical form crouched at the stove and took a step back as it straightened up and kept rising. Not Lem.

  Ida shut the door forcefully and the man whirled around. “Good Lord, you startled me.”

  Well, he’d startled Ida too, even though she knew him well enough: Mose Barstow’s brother, Henry, a man she’d first met long before she’d met Mose, or come to that, Ezra.

  The opening exhibit at the Boston Art Club was an event of which people took notice: artists, art patrons, politicians, and most valued of all, society. Mrs. McKinley had allowed the loan of her portrait, and it and a golden bowl of lilies Ida had been particularly proud of occupied a corner of a wall crowded with works of other undiscovered artists. At first Ida had bemoaned that positioning, but after a half hour she realized that it allowed her work to stand out as perhaps a rung above her neighbors’. She lingered as unobtrusively as she could until Mr. Morris spied her and came dashing up just as he dashed at her in the studio. He pointed at the portrait. “Yes, yes, yes, Miss Russell, now you’ve got the ground just right.”

  A couple standing just the other side of Morris swiveled to look, the man an unusual combination of light hair and dark eyes, the woman a shimmering redhead who seemed unsurprised by the number of eyes that swiveled her way.

  “Is this your work?” the man asked.

  Ida nodded.

  “Extraordinary.” The man looked again at the portrait. “Do I know this lady?” He bent down to read the label and a pair of vertical lines sprang up between his eyebrows. “Perhaps not.”

  Ida studied the man, who continued to study the portrait. “Was Mrs. McKinley pleased with your rendering?”

  “She was.”

  “Her eyes are so remarkably—”

  “Empty? I painted them as they were. An utter void.”

  There the man lifted his own eyes to meet Ida’s, and in them she saw an understanding that surprised her, as if they’d talked about this before, as if they shared a secret knowledge of this woman or this painting or this day. Had Ida lived it before? But now the man was smiling at her, and it was the kind of smile that could only draw up the corners of Ida’s mouth in answer. “And yet she was pleased with the portrait,” the man said. “Which perhaps speaks to another void.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Henry,” the redhead cut in. “She was made to look beautiful, which is all any woman wants. Isn’t that so, miss? But she couldn’t have been this beautiful; so few women are.”

  “She wasn’t,” Ida said. “But she thought she was. Hence, she was pleased with my work. The eyes were my sole bit of honesty.”

  Now the man—Henry, it would appear his name was—grew pensive. “Ah, honesty. We think it an absolute, don’t we? We think a thing or a person is honest or dishonest, and yet there are these shades, these times—” The man’s pensive gaze turned to his wife.

  “Henry, we should have my portrait done,” she said. “In the style of Sargent. Wouldn’t that be lovely, a portr
ait in the style of Sargent?” She addressed Ida. “You could manage that, surely? Take a study of his scandalous Madame X. I could be your scandalous Madame Y.”

  “I’d hate to rob Mr. Sargent of his next scandal,” Ida said. “Or his next letter.”

  The man—Henry—turned a delighted gaze on Ida. He spoke quietly. Intently. “Best you leave Sargent to Sargent and work on the next Russell,” he said.

  As they walked away Ida could hear the woman’s surgically clear voice trailing behind: “Obviously that woman has a lot more free time than I do.”

  Between that day and the present one Ida had run into Henry Barstow a number of times and had always been compelled by those eyes. If she were to paint those eyes she’d use something warm, like burnt sienna, and she’d put a touch of the sienna in that wheat-colored hair. Perhaps a touch of that wheat in the eyes . . . But it wasn’t so much the colors that always drew Ida to seek out Henry Barstow’s eyes—it was the invitation in them, to laugh, or to live, or to share some bit of knowledge or thought or feeling or . . . what? Ida collected herself. Right now the eyes were nothing but solemn.

  “My sympathies, Mrs. Pease,” Barstow said.

  “How did you get in here?” Ida asked. “What are you doing in here?”

  Barstow reached into his pocket and withdrew a key. “Right now I’m trying to get this stove to stop smoking. But in fact I’m my brother’s executor.” He paused. “And your husband’s. Did you not know of that?”

  “I did not.” But Ida conceded to herself it was possible that Ezra might have mentioned it during one of those conversations where, in the interest of self-preservation, Ida had stopped listening much.

  “Is there a convenient time we might meet?” Barstow asked. “There are things to discuss. I’ve come over from New Bedford.”