Looking at Henry’s face, Ida saw that it had not. She whirled for the door. Henry followed.
“Ida. I knew how you felt about Ezra. I knew what you’d gone through with your family. I decided it would only torment you further—”
“You decided. You! I’ll decide my own torment. Oh, I knew this. I knew there was something not right, and it wasn’t all your wife. I wanted so badly to trust you and I never could, I never felt I was seeing to the bottom of you. And now I know why.” Ida banged out the door. Outside, she spied Perry’s bicycle leaning against the building. She wrenched it away and shoved it through the door at Henry. “Give your wife back her bicycle. And her husband.”
Ida climbed the hill without a hint of a tremble in her now, her rage powering her and clearing her mind. She knew what to do: She would collect her evidence and go to the constable, tell them where Ezra was, what he had done, what he’d confessed to doing. She formed the list as she walked: the pamphlet; the card for the assayer who was clearly implicated in some way, judging by his reaction to Ida’s name when she’d visited him in Boston. Yes, there Henry had helped her—she must remember to talk of the empty office, the withdrawal of funds; they would call on Henry to confirm, but whether he would do so or not would be his decision to make. He might prefer to protect Mose; in fact, perhaps that accounted for Henry’s unwillingness to talk of Mose, for his lack of visible grief for his brother. But what did it matter? According to Ezra, Mose was long gone, while Ezra planned to remain on Block Island until mid-August. Ezra was her concern, not Mose.
And not Henry Barstow.
When Ida topped the rise she saw Hattie and Oliver in her garden, pulling radishes out of the ground. Oliver’s joy was like a liniment smoothed over sore muscles, so much so that Ida didn’t trouble to look at Hattie’s face for some time. When Hattie finally caught her eye, she motioned to Ida to follow her a distance away.
“It’s Ruth. That detective finally came. Apparently Ezra was involved in a scheme to cheat investors in some sort of scam to mine gold, and they found Ruth’s name on the investor list. She’s devastated. I tried to calm her but got nowhere—the usual chant—what does some old spinster know about anything?”
Ida peered at Hattie, seeing for the first time the depth of the bitterness in her.
Hattie kept on. “As difficult as she’s been with you, she does believe you know things. Would you talk to her?”
“No.”
“Please, Ida. She thought the world of that man. That he attempted to cheat her—”
“She made out all right. She got the farm.”
“The farm doesn’t matter! It’s the fact that he tried! Her darling Ezra had tried to cheat her. If she hadn’t insisted on his handing over the deed, she’d be a pauper right now.”
Ida doubted pauper was the accurate word, but Hattie had said other words that struck Ida like darts. Ezra had tried. How could he try to cheat his own aunt? How could he try to convince Ida, with three victims of the sea in her family already, that he’d drowned?
And then there was the matter of the larger deception that Ruth—and Hattie—didn’t yet know.
“Keep Oliver away,” Ida said and set off up the hill.
The Ruth that Ida found was a Ruth Ida had never seen before. She sat at the kitchen table, whitened hands gripping a cup of tea still full to the brim, the flesh on her face sagging against her bones, her eyes red and dull.
Ida sat down. “I saw Hattie down at the—”
“How could he?”
“I don’t know, Ruth. I really don’t. I didn’t know him; I see that now.”
Ruth lifted her eyes. “Did he take from you too?”
Ida thought of the disappearance of her family fortune, such as it was. “He didn’t need my permission to use my money. That’s the way the law goes. But yes, he took from me too.”
“He was a lovely boy. Like Oliver. I didn’t like Oliver. He was too like Ezra. He made it too hard to excuse Ezra and I always excused Ezra. Every time.”
“Until now. So that’s a good thing, Ruth. You can stop struggling to excuse him. You can take Oliver into your heart for his own self. You’re exactly right—he’s a lovely boy.”
“He lies.”
“Not so much now he knows his father’s—” Ida had been about to say dead. Dear God, what to tell the boy now? What to tell Ruth? Ida took another look at the old woman, at the reddened veins in her eyes, at the death grip on the mug of tea, surely cold by now. Ruth tried to say something, but her mouth trembled so badly she couldn’t speak. Tears welled and leaked. There was nothing Ida could think of that was uglier, more painful to the observer, than an old woman’s tears.
Ida couldn’t tell her. What purpose would it serve? If the law caught up with Ezra before he left the country, Ruth would have to know, but she didn’t need a second shock just now. And Oliver? Someday, it might happen that Oliver too would need to know, but not now, not from Ida’s tongue, not when he’d just grown accustomed to the idea of his father being dead; there were only so many twists and turns a five-year-old mind could execute and still keep to the road. Ida got up, collected a clean dish towel, and handed it to Ruth to dry her eyes, but Ruth snatched it and blew her nose instead. She pushed away her tea.
“You’ve a right to your tears,” Ida said. “I’ve a right to mine. But let’s see if we can’t get them over with before Hattie brings Oliver home. He doesn’t need to know what his father’s done.”
That brought Ruth’s head up. “No.” She peered at Ida. “I never once saw you cry. I never once saw you look like you even cared.”
“I like to do my crying in private.”
Ruth studied Ida some more. “Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?” She splayed her hands flat on the table and pushed down; she seemed to struggle to rise but Ida knew better than to lend a hand. “I’m going to wash my face,” Ruth said. “If you wouldn’t mind staying until Oliver returns, in case I’m unable—”
“Wash your face. I’ll be here.”
29
Ida was in the garden with Oliver making a pretext of overseeing his harvest when in fact she was overseeing nothing but her own mind. Ruth was right—Ida shed no tears—but Ruth might have been shocked at the violence of Ida’s inner turmoil, the struggle she was having trying to reconcile right and wrong, truth and lies, who paid versus who benefited. If she went to the law the whole pathetic tale would be known; Ruth would learn that Ezra had deceived her a second time in a way that would cut so deep into the old woman’s heart the wound couldn’t possibly heal. And Oliver would have to live with the knowledge that his father was a criminal who had abandoned his son not once but twice.
And Ida? If Ezra were found and jailed and forced to make restitution to his investors, which was certainly what Dermott Hale was after, the buildings on Main Street and the parcel of land on Block Island might be confiscated. And even if Ezra was locked away, how long would he stay there? At some point he’d be freed, and then what? Would he attempt to reclaim his farm, his life, his wife? But even if he did none of those things, even if Ida got away to Boston, would she ever stop looking and listening for him to appear on her doorstep? While if Ida did nothing, if she allowed Ezra to climb aboard the Umbria in August, the courts would eventually declare him dead. And to maintain that fiction, to remain safe from the law, Ezra would have to keep away—from the island and from Ida—forever. And all Ida need do was to continue to pretend to the island that she was the widow everyone already believed her to be, to continue to pretend to Ezra that she was exactly as shallow and avaricious as he believed her to be, that she was willing to sit and wait for that second ticket to Paris.
But to let Ezra win . . . Ida floundered. Raged. That Ezra could allow her to think he’d drowned after what she’d been through with her family, that he could prey on his own aunt, proved him so far beneath the low tide mark of humanity that she wasn’t sure she could draw her own line in that sand. She wasn’t sure she could weigh Ezra fr
ee against Ida free and declare them to have come out even. One minute Ida could. The next she could not. Ezra in Paris counting his money, Ida trapped on the Vineyard elbow deep in some sheep’s backside, or in Boston unable to afford a new pair of boots, proved a more difficult image for her to ponder than Ezra lying at the bottom of the sea being eaten by crabs.
There Ida left off thinking about Ezra and moved on to Henry. But as it turned out, Henry required a good deal less thought than Ezra; Ida had never allowed herself to fully trust Henry in the first place, so when his deception was proved she had less to regret. Except for that one day, that one afternoon, that one hour that she had trusted, almost begged . . . Ida grew hot and cold with mortification in turns. She walked the perimeter of the garden in an effort to recalibrate her thermometer, and just as she reached the door, the phone began to ring. Ida let it ring.
When Hattie came up the hill to collect Oliver she said, “I’ve been ringing you and ringing you. Can’t you hear that phone from out here? Henry Barstow is trying to reach you.”
“I’m not interested in talking to Mr. Barstow.”
“What? Lem said—”
“You’d best learn not to listen to everything Lem tells you either.”
Either? What was Ida rambling on about? Hattie’s eyes asked the question a second after Ida’s brain asked it, but Ida turned away to avoid answering either of them.
Ida was abovestairs collecting bed linens for the wash when through the open window she heard the unmistakable sound of bicycle wheels; she looked out and saw the same scene she’d seen once before: Henry, standing on the pedals of his wife’s bicycle, pumping his way up the track. Ida stepped back from the window, sat down on the bare mattress. She listened to the knock, the call, the repeat. How many kinds of fool would Ida have to be to open that door? She retreated from the window and went to her studio, but there was Henry again, staring out at her from the unfinished canvas. She went to the window and looked out; Henry was gone, but the bicycle rested against the barn. From the window she could see an envelope tucked into the basket.
Ida took the stairs with caution, half afraid she’d find Henry sitting at her kitchen table. She crossed the empty kitchen, stepped outside, looked down the track: no Henry. She approached the bicycle as if it were a trap, as if when she picked up that envelope a giant spring would close on her fingers and pin her there. Ida, Henry had written,
Whatever your feelings regarding me, the bicycle is yours. I made a clean purchase of it. It’s not a gift to you but to me—picturing you out on the roads is the most joyful image I’m able to conjure right now, and I beg you won’t deny either of us that benefit. Regarding the estate, I’ll proceed no further until I hear from you as to what you plan to do about Ezra. I must leave Vineyard Haven on Sunday for a meeting with another potential buyer, but a note will always reach me if sent to H. M. Barstow, Inc., Union Street, New Bedford. Always—H.
Always. What had that art instructor Cecily Matson said? When is always ever always?
Never.
Ida rode to the office, but Henry wasn’t in it, or in the apartment, or in the warehouse. She wheeled the bicycle into the shop where she intended to leave it, but after a minute’s reflection she changed her mind. One last ride. She set out along the beach road toward Cottage City, concentrating on the feel of the wind against her face, the tug at her hair, the pull in her thighs and calves, sensations she wanted to remember once they were gone. She’d seen an advertisement in the newspaper for the new chainless bicycle, priced at seventy-five dollars, but by the time Ida managed to acquire that much money, she’d be too old to pedal it.
As Ida drew closer to Cottage City, she spied a scene she felt a sudden urge to paint: a sap-green field populated with figures clad in almost every color in her paint box, playing baseball. Mose Barstow was the one who had loved baseball. He’d loved the Boston Bean Eaters; he’d loved to tell Ida about the games while Ezra stood by and yawned. When the Bean Eaters had won their second straight National League pennant, Ida had thought Mose would kill himself drinking; she’d been so relieved to see him stagger in behind Ezra she’d forgotten herself when he grabbed her and kissed her.
Ezra had said something about it later, in bed, as they lay side by side not touching, not an easy thing to manage considering the sag in the mattress. “I don’t appreciate your free ways, Ida. Time to straighten out. Now.”
“What ways?”
“Kissing anyone who happens to come through that door. Kissing people who are friends to me, not you.”
Ezra had had his fair share of whiskey, and Ida knew better, but she said it anyway. “You wish he’d kissed you instead?”
Ezra thrashed his way out of the bed, leaned over her, hissed hot breath in her face. “I’m warning you, Ida. Watch yourself.”
Ida had never been afraid of Ezra and wasn’t then, but she was afraid of something. What? That drip drip drip of snowmelt, stretching out for years in front of her.
But now Ida pulled her bicycle off the road and into the field to watch the game. It was because of the day; it was because of the fact that this was her last ride; it was because of the fact that she needed to stand on the edge of that field and come to terms with the fact that Mose had also betrayed her. I liked him, Ida had told his brother. Perhaps that was why she felt so wounded by Mose; she’d liked him. And what was she to do with that liking now?
It took a number of minor skirmishes between runners and fielders before bat and ball finally connected with a crack like lightning. The ball soared; the figures in the field moved as if of a single mind and on a single plan; chess of a sort, or so Ida imagined it. But a lone figure out in left field was the one who seemed to see where the ball was going first; he lit out like a flame, or rather like a match, a long, slender form topped by a head of hair turning gold in the sun; he stretched out his arm, deftly snagged the ball, and threw it home hard and true.
Henry.
Ida remounted and pedaled back the way she’d come. Before she’d gone a quarter of her route, the sky closed in; the friendly ecru clouds took on an ominous charcoal underbelly; raindrops buried themselves in her scalp. In Boston, the weather never inconvenienced Ida the way it did on the island; Ida could stay inside in Boston, or hop aboard a trolley, or flag down a hack, or just duck inside the Parker House for a cup of tea. Never—or hardly ever—did she have to go out and face up to whatever fell from the sky or blew over the cobbles or bit at the back of her neck.
Ida ducked her head and pedaled harder. She let herself into the office, leaned the bicycle against the desk, and fished for a pencil and paper to leave Henry a note, but when she didn’t find any at a first pass she gave up. What words need be added? The bicycle said all she wished.
During the wet walk home Ida remembered other such days where the island weather had defeated her: that soaking day when she’d attempted to teach Oliver his letters; the time she’d trudged out with Ezra’s crook to unearth any sheep buried in the drifts; the many, many mornings when she’d been warm and dry inside and had to brave every possible combination of cold and wet to tend to her animals; and of course, those three days of what everyone on the island now called the Portland Gale. But had those weather days really defeated her? Hadn’t she—and Henry—gotten Oliver to learn the game of chess? Saved a sheep from that snowdrift? Experienced the delicious warming of numb feet in front of a hot fire after slogging through the cold and wet? Survived that gale with farm intact? Ida pulled the collar of her jacket tight and picked up her pace. Stop being such a whinger, she told herself. She’d survive this too. She’d survive it all. She was not her mother. And she was just drawing opposite Tilton’s Hardware. It was no Parker House, but it was dry. Ida ducked in.
Mr. Tilton took a look at her, disappeared, and returned with a dry towel. Ida wiped her face and neck. “Thank you.”
“What are you doing out in this?” Mr. Tilton asked.
“Bicycling.”
Tilton shook his head.
“It wasn’t raining when I started.”
“I should hope not. I never thought you that foolish.”
Ida studied Mr. Tilton, saw nothing but kindness in his eyes. “How foolish did you think me?”
Tilton grinned. Ida had never seen him grin before; it wrinkled his face all the way to the eyes and at once Ida wanted to paint him. “Well, I just never heard of a Boston artist taking up sheep farming,” Tilton said.
“Foolish,” Ida agreed, grinning back. How could she help it?
But now Tilton sobered. “Of course you didn’t plan to do it alone, now did you?” He paused. “I never did say it before and would like to say it now, how sorry I am about your husband. Terrible thing that is.”
Oh, how fast a simple exchange could turn treacherous: a thank you today became a lie tomorrow. Or not. “It is,” Ida answered.
30
On the first official day of summer Ida stood on the stoop to take it in. She’d slid and slogged through wind, rain, snow, sleet, ice, and mud to keep her farm animals alive; this day the air was so still it might have been a painting except for the hawk coasting on an invisible current far above, the sun warming her face, the catbirds chipping at her from the trees. So, her life wasn’t all snowmelt. Ida watched the hawk for another long minute, feeling the urge to paint something, wishing she had that bicycle. Still, it wasn’t a long walk to West Chop Light.
Ida set out, enjoying the white shell road that stretched flat and sparkling under her boots. But again, the lighthouse proved to be another favorite spot for the Summer Institute. Ida did an about-turn before the class could spot her and almost succeeded in escaping unnoticed until Cecily Matson rose to examine one of her students’ work and spied Ida. She strode toward Ida with purpose, the kind of purpose that Ida suspected would be difficult if not impossible to deny.
Painting the Light Page 23
