“No.”
He wanted to know the mother and father of the sheep who ran off, and when Ida realized she knew who the mother was, she felt proud. She pointed to the ram in his paddock. “He’s not the father of any of these sheep but he’ll be the father of all the lambs born this year.”
“Where’s these sheep’s father?”
“Sold. You can’t keep the same father year after year.”
“Why not?”
Ida wasn’t up to explaining about inbreeding. “It’s the rule,” she said, which for some odd reason seemed to satisfy the boy. He went back to his hole and Ida went inside to finish her wash, but when she looked out and saw the same intense pose she’d noticed earlier she picked up her pad and charcoal and positioned herself at the window. The curve of his head and neck were easy enough, the shell-like shape of the ear, but she couldn’t get the desperate clench of the fingers around the stick because they kept shifting, and although she knew just what she wanted to do with the light, the charcoal wouldn’t capture it. It would serve as a study for a watercolor, though, or even a pastel . . . Ida was making notes along the edge of the pad when the telephone rang.
“Morgan’s brought up a load,” Henry said.
They stood in front of a mountain of blackened junk now piled on the warehouse floor. “Morgan said he’d take the capstan, winch, anchor, and chain as his share. The rest is ours.”
“The rest of what?” Ida kicked aside what looked like part of a galley stove, extracted a bulbous, black orb with a hole where the face plate had been. Mose’s dive helmet. She fished again and found the lead sole of one of the weighted shoes, and a piece of copper shaped like half an ox yoke that she recognized as the corselet to the dive suit. Ida picked up the helmet and rubbed at the black until a gleam of copper showed. Henry pushed aside a few other bits of black. “Compressor.” Ida bent to look and when she turned around Oliver was halfway into the pile.
“Oliver! Get out of there!”
Henry, at least, heard her. He waded into the pile, gripped Oliver by the back of the coat and hoisted him free.
They resurrected a blackened ship’s lantern; a dented coffeepot; the ship’s bell; and an odd, large, flat-bottomed copper kettle lined with some kind of gray matter. Henry scraped at the gray. “Tin? Zinc?”
“Why would someone line a copper kettle with tin or zinc?”
Henry didn’t answer.
Before they finished they’d found three more identical kettles and piled them together on one side of the floor. Henry picked them up one by one and turned them over, brow knitted, as Ida looked on.
“What are they?”
“I can’t figure it. Copper would heat better than zinc or tin. It’s more durable. And then this odd hole just below the lip.”
“And four of them.”
They stood side by side and studied the kettles, Oliver anchored between them by Henry’s hand on his shoulder.
Ida gave up first. She bent down to Oliver and attempted to erase some of the black by brushing it with her fingers, but it only smeared. “Hattie will kill me.”
“Come,” Henry said. He took Oliver by the hand and led the way up the stairs to his apartment.
Ida stripped off Oliver’s outer garments and Henry stood him at the sink to scrub his hands and face with a gritty brown soap that Ida hoped never to encounter herself, while she took a wet cloth to the jacket and trousers. She could hear Oliver chattering away at the sink—something about a red ship with blue sails—interspersed with Henry’s responses: Indeed. Curious. You don’t say. By the time Oliver’s clothes had gone from black to gray, Oliver had gone from black to spotless.
“All right,” Henry declared. “Safe to take him back.”
Ida had planned to walk Oliver to the exchange alone, but Henry declared his own business with Chester Luce and fell in alongside. At the exchange Ida reminded Hattie of the bicycle lesson.
“Oh,” Hattie said, “I think not today.”
“Oliver can help. He says he has a bicycle.”
Hattie laughed. “That his father bought him.”
Oh, thought Ida. So not.
Ida continued on up the hill. Henry came with her. Ida didn’t remind him of his business with Chester Luce—it wasn’t up to her to keep his affairs straight—and besides, he’d launched into another topic of some interest.
“I wanted to tell you I’m going to Newport next week,” Henry said.
Ida, thinking of the way Henry had captured Oliver off the junk pile, how he’d stood guard over him at the sink as if he’d done it before, said, “Are your girls in Newport too?”
“Good Lord, I would hope not. They’re with my wife’s parents.” Henry paused. “Often, it seems.”
As Ida had nothing to say to that, they walked on in silence. The low winter light had dropped below the hill by the time they reached Ida’s house, and for no sensible reason other than to defy Ruth and Lem, Ida said, “Would you come in?”
Ida roused the fire and lit the lamps. She made roasted cheese and put it out with a leftover onion soup and the whiskey bottle, all of which seemed to please Henry. When he finished eating he stretched his legs to the fire and crossed his arms over his chest. Long before he spoke Ida knew he had something to say that would carry some weight.
“You told me you didn’t like Ezra much,” he said. “Even at the beginning?”
“Do you think I’d marry someone I didn’t like?” And there it was again—the tone. Was Ruth right? Had she no manners?
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “I don’t know how independent of each other the two things are—liking and loving. I know I wanted my wife more than anything on earth, but when I saw that portrait of yours at the Boston Art Guild—”
Ida swiveled toward Henry in surprise. “Of Mrs. McKinley?”
“I saw that woman’s face and couldn’t imagine it with either a laugh or a tear. Then I looked at Perry standing beside her, the same face, only younger, and I realized why the woman in the portrait looked so familiar. I’d never seen Perry with either a laugh or a tear. Or not an honest one, at least.”
“Don’t tell me that looking at my portrait made you decide to divorce her.”
Henry stood up, walked to the window, looked out at that darkness, walked back, looked down at Ida. “Perhaps I didn’t explain my situation clearly enough,” he said, his voice tight. “It was my wife who decided to divorce me.”
“And you who decided to go to Newport.”
“If you have a point to make, please do.”
Oh, she’d heard that before. From Ezra. Is there a point here? As a rule, when they reached the point in a conversation Ida walked away, understanding that they’d gone beyond any hope of useful communication.
But Ida did have a point to make. “You do understand whether or not you divorce is not my business?”
“Excuse me. I thought we knew each other well enough to share our dilemmas. I didn’t like my husband much. My wife and I are divorcing.” He moved toward the door. “Thank you for the lovely meal. I’m now two in your debt.”
“Henry.”
He turned.
“It only seemed to me you were testing your decision, seeking my opinion as to whether it was right. Which I can’t give. You do see that?”
He studied her. “Yes, I suppose. Of course.”
“But I must say, if you’re testing your decision, it seems to me that it would imply some doubt.”
Henry returned to the fire, dropped into the chair, and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You and Ezra. What was it like in the beginning?”
One clear, warm summer night, not long after they’d met at the wedding, Ida had opened the door of her empty brownstone to find Ezra Pease on the stoop. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, no tie, his coat slung over one shoulder; the light from the open door put a shine in his eyes and when he spoke his teeth gleamed.
“I’ve come to take you walking.”
Without going ba
ck inside, without a covering of any kind, Ida had pulled the door closed behind her, and they’d walked up the hill side by side. Ezra talked of the fine night, of the crime of wasting it indoors; he inquired of her health and spirits; were things getting better?
“Not better,” Ida answered. “Easier.”
“Tell me about your family.” Ezra’s voice was low and intimate, as if only he would care to know, and Ida told him, at much more length than she’d supposed possible: how she’d idolized both her brothers far beyond any hope of them living up to her construction; how her mother had been warm and enveloping but her father had been distant, forcing her to strive to gain a look or a word. That striving made those looks, those words, far more valuable in Ida’s eyes than her mother’s warmth; Ida said this for the first time to Ezra Pease, and said it with such pain she’d been unable to say anything else for a time. But they’d reached the top of the hill, and Ezra took her by the shoulders and turned her, pointing, his head so close to hers she could feel his breath: the Big and Little Dipper. The Seven Sisters. The Summer Triangle. Ida pretended she hadn’t known perfectly well where they were, and on the way down she’d recovered herself enough to ask of his family. The situation was similar but vastly different: father, mother, and three sisters all dead, but slowly, one at a time, over a span of twenty years.
“I have one aunt left,” he said. “And a cousin. I’d like to take you to meet them, to see my farm.” His farm.
Ida told Henry some, but not all of this. Her intention had been to show that her decision to marry Ezra had not been irrational, that she could reasonably have done so with the expectation of perfect happiness. But what had seemed so dazzling on that night, so star-filled above and below, now seemed contrived, even manipulative, in the retelling. Granted she was younger and freshly bruised, but why hadn’t she seen then what she saw now? For one, the way Ezra had assumed Ida’s willingness to go out walking alone. For another, the ways he found to put his hands on her in a context she would be unable—or at least unlikely—to oppose.
But when Ida finished telling Henry her tale he said only, “Yes.”
“At the beginning, I forgave Ezra everything,” Ida said. “At the end, nothing. Perhaps I’m in part to blame.”
Henry leaned over, gripped the arm of Ida’s chair. “There are some things that are unforgivable,” he said. “There are some people . . . There are times when one must stop striving to forgive or understand or explain and simply move on. To open that door and step through it.” He looked down at his hand, still gripping the arm of Ida’s chair, as if unsure as to how it got there. He drew it away; stood up. “I must go,” he said.
He opened Ida’s door and stepped through it. After he’d gone some way down the track his voice wafted back up the hill through the night: Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter . . .
Again, Ida had neglected to tell Henry about the gold. By now, it seemed, she should be wondering why that was.
13
It became a routine; on the days that Hattie worked she dropped Oliver with Ida on her way to the exchange and picked him up on her way home. Ida tried twice more to give Hattie a bicycling lesson, but each time she refused. “I have Oliver,” she said the first time, even though Oliver was deep in the barn attempting to get the ox to smile, and “I’m tired to the bone,” she said the second time, but then ran up the hill after Oliver.
Ida didn’t mind caring for Oliver, but she did find the boy troubling, in part because of her lack of experience with children; neither brother had lived long enough to provide Ida with nephews or nieces and there had been no child during her marriage to Ezra. Ezra had been convinced the fault lay with Ida and Ida had been too unsure of her scientific ground to counter his claim, but she hadn’t minded her childless state; Ezra, the sheep, the chickens, these had been enough to tax her, and she was quite sure if she did have children it would put an end to her ever getting out her paints.
The second reason Ida struggled with Oliver was the boy himself. Why was his head always down? Why did he eat as if it were a punishment? Why did he speak so little? Why did he dig all the time? Ida did find ways to lure him out of the ground: he was fascinated by Bett and the ox and the sheep, and she’d managed to interest him in the chickens to the point that he would scatter their corn and hunt for eggs, but if the schedule held any gaps, he filled them with holes.
The days of icy winter rain were hardest. One such day when Oliver had returned from the window for the eighth time to declare on the basis of nothing that it was stopping now, Ida took out her sketch pad and pencils and attempted to teach him his letters. Oliver had just announced that he hated letters and supposedly accidentally snapped off the point of his pencil when the telephone rang: Henry Barstow, with a question about a notation in one of the ledgers.
“What does EMS mean followed by various numbers?”
“I haven’t the first idea. Oliver, stop digging at that plant!”
“Sounds busy there.”
“I’m teaching Oliver the alphabet. We’ve mastered O.”
“You’ve gotten all the way to O? Impressive.”
“We haven’t gotten all the way to O, we began with O. I’m teaching him his name.”
“Oh.”
Ida laughed, ridiculously cheered. “And now he’s lost his pencil. Oliver, leave that plant alone! What time is it?”
“Ten to two.”
Ida sighed. “Two hours and ten minutes to go. Ah well, the odds were good I’d have killed that plant anyway. Is it still miserable out?”
“Extremely.”
“Ah, well. Stay warm.”
“And you.”
The knock came at five after two, startling Oliver and Ida both. Ida opened the door and Henry whooshed in shaking off the rain as Bett would do. “The perfect rainy day to visit friends indoors.”
“I hate rain,” Oliver said.
“I wonder how you feel about chess.”
“I hate chess.”
“Ah, that’s too bad, as I was in the mood for a game. Ida, what about you?”
“If you’d teach me.”
“That’s one of my favorite things to do.” Henry reached into his pocket, pulled out a small case, flipped it open, and tipped out what looked like dozens of tiny pieces made up of bits of horses, people in odd hats, and broken turrets. Or bedposts. He arranged the pieces on the table in front of Ida, demonstrating how each one moved. “The queen has all the talent but only the king matters. Unfair, I know—”
Ida sneaked a look at Oliver at the window; no child could have resisted the miniature kingdom that Henry had produced, and sure enough, Oliver had turned around and fixed his eyes on the board. When Henry finished demonstrating how the pieces moved and a bare minimum of rules he pointed to one of the pawns. “All right, Mrs. Pease. Which way does he move?”
“Straight!” Oliver shouted, plopping down at the table.
When Hattie arrived to collect her charge, a slightly frayed Henry and an obstreperous Oliver were sprawled on the rug in heated argument over why a knight couldn’t carry a pawn on its back when it jumped, and Ida sat perched on the sofa, attempting to sketch Oliver. She hadn’t been pleased with the efforts thus far—her usual subjects didn’t go from kneel to crouch to belly flop in rapid succession, and parts of him were a blur. As Hattie approached, Ida closed her sketchbook.
“Mayn’t I look?”
“No,” Henry said from the floor. “Or so she told me. I attempted one peek and that’s when she exiled us to the floor.”
“Too soon for showing,” Ida said, but in truth her pencil had slid from Oliver to Henry as if of its own volition and she was afraid of what that meant, afraid of the echoing sadness she kept mining in his features. Was he recalling playing chess with his daughters? Or with his brother? Or had he been one of those lonely boys who’d played by himself? Even more troubling was the fact that she’d dared take out her sketch pad in front of Henry in the first place.
“Come along
, Oliver,” Hattie said.
“It’s my turn.”
“Game over,” Henry said. “I have to play with Mrs. Pease now.”
Hattie opened her mouth but closed it without speaking. She collected Oliver and left.
Henry packed up his game and stood. “Did I cause trouble for you just now?”
“How?”
“If Hattie tells her mother I was playing with Mrs. Pease—”
“Too late. Ruth’s already told me to stop riding around with you. So did Lem Daggett.”
Henry studied her. “And are you?”
“I was until they said that. Tea?”
“Tea,” Henry said.
Tea led to Ida’s offering Henry a bowl of chowder. The chowder led to Ida thinking—and talking—of Mose. “He used to bring us clams,” she said. “In exchange for a bowl of chowder. He approved of my chowder. He approved of anything I put in front of him, come to that. He said he could smell my chowder at the bottom of the hill.”
Abruptly, Henry stood up and carried his bowl to the sink. “It’s grown late. I’d best go.”
So Henry didn’t wish to talk of Mose. Although Ida had had no desire to talk of Ezra, she’d imagined Henry would have a different feeling about his brother, that he might like to remember and talk of him with someone who had cared for him too. How desperately she’d wanted to talk of her brothers, but after her mother drowned, Ida had had no one to talk to about them. Even so, if it proved too difficult for Henry, Ida would respect that and move on. If he ever happened to stop by again.
He stopped by two days later. The rain had dissipated but the clouds hadn’t; they hovered, pressing the sky low. Ida had been standing at the window making a study of the clouds, attempting to learn what they predicted, but she’d managed to draw few consistent conclusions when Henry wheeled into view. He approached the house carrying an odd, deep, flat-sided basket trailing two leather straps. “A basket for your bicycle,” he explained. “So you can carry your sketchbook.”
Painting the Light Page 11
