In her father’s attic, sweat soaking her dress, Susannah Story knelt beside a ceramic lighthouse her father had bought for her in Maine. The lighthouse was white, with a wide black stripe around the middle and a black turret on top. At night when she was a child and they weren’t traveling, her father would light a candle and place it through the lighthouse’s door and the thin walls would glow in a way that reminded her of skin, as if a person or animal had been emptied out and lit from within. The candle was meant to help her fall asleep, but Susannah didn’t need help with that—it was her brothers in the next room who were afraid, her older brothers who remembered their mother well and called out sometimes in the night like babies. Susannah had been four when she died and remembered little of her. The lighthouse scared her more than the dark did. She would carry it into her brothers’ room and in the morning they would put it back in hers. In this way Caleb didn’t have to know and everyone slept.
Susannah squinted into the corners of the attic. She was looking for the box of tiny American flags, to plant around the lawn for her father’s party tomorrow. Her plan was to take them out of the box and carry them down in little bunches. She was not supposed to carry anything at all, not supposed to swim or walk too fast or ride in a car. She probably wasn’t supposed to climb the drop-down ladder to the attic, either, or scavenge in a sweltering attic. Even the dust motes looked lethargic, tumbling through the steamy air.
Turn a corner, bump into another rule, another shaking head, another set of hands, cold metal—this was the path to motherhood, as far as Susannah could tell. It was Susannah’s path at least. But she couldn’t bear to listen to the doctors anymore, to stay in bed, have tea brought to her, read a novel, nap. It made her feel like an old woman, made her feel sick. Susannah could not believe her barrenness was a sickness, or even that she was barren—she was pregnant, after all! She had several friends who had borne children—“friends” perhaps a stretch, though she liked these women and they seemed to like her, the wives of Josiah’s business cohorts, who were not exactly his friends either; his friends were back on Mason Street, where he rarely had time to go. The point was none of those women had spent their days in bed. They were educated, like Susannah, if not at college then by tutors. Their ambitions ranged, however rangily, beyond their children, a hazy, appetizing swirl of benefit dances and easels and bagging trousers. They were too busy to lie in bed. Susannah wanted to be busy, too. She was happiest busy: swimming, shopping, visiting the quarry, advising Josiah. She missed the men standing from their benches to greet her, missed the smell of dynamite and dust. Her legs bounced when she sat, twitched when she lay down. Besides, she had stayed in bed last time, and what difference had it made?
She found the box of flags on top of a steamer trunk. Her sweat was monumental now, stinging her eyes, dripping from her fingers and nose, slicking the floor. She breathed deeply. It felt good. It would have felt even better if she could dive into the ocean afterward. The tide was high. Maybe she would. Maybe she would dive off the dock—or, a fair concession, jump—and be instantly cleansed, one salt replaced with another, her mood remade. Ten minutes would be enough, even five. Then she would go home, take a bath, get in bed, and wait for Josiah to come home. She would pretend to have lain in bed all day like a good patient and ask Josiah questions about the quarry without betraying her longing for it. If he asked about tomorrow’s party she would tell him the long table linens were pressed and that her father had fetched the flags, the minor lie a precaution in case she miscarried again, for no matter how gentle Josiah was about her losses, she knew he—like her doctors—must blame her in some way. Then they would share a nice supper and go to sleep holding each other’s hand (his left, her right) and though at some point in the night he might leave the bed for a few hours, in the morning he would be there, his rumpled face against her hair.
She knew about Josiah’s affair. Of course she did. Not the details but the basic fact of it. She was not stupid. She had noticed when he took her necklace. And she did not always sleep as well as she had when she was a child. Josiah assumed it of her but he was simply nostalgic for something he’d never even known, pining for the myth of her.
She loved this about Josiah: his capacity for belief, his willingness to be swept up in a good tale.
Susannah opened the box and grabbed a bunch of flags, then she dropped the flags back down and picked up the whole box. It was not that heavy. On her way to the ladder she picked up the lighthouse, too. Josiah would like it, she thought, and he would like the story that went along with it. And maybe, just maybe, there would be a child, and the child would like the lighthouse, and sleep with it, as Susannah’s brothers had.
With both her hands occupied, the ladder proved a bit tricky, but the rungs were flat and Susannah welcomed the challenge, shifting her weight into her toes, winging her elbows for balance. Her skin rose into goose bumps as she reached the bottom.
“Susannah?”
Her father. He was galloping up the stairs from the first floor, his short legs like springs. He spent his days in his office, with the door closed. Susannah had not considered his emergence a possibility. He was looking at her, and past her, at the ladder, with unmistakable anger.
“I was only going to get the flags,” she said. “I’m fine.” And she was. She was better than fine. In her mind she was swimming already. But her father would not see this. He would see only the heat in her cheeks, the sweat rolling down her skin.
“Susannah,” he growled. He took the box from her, then the lighthouse. “You know you’re not—”
“Please don’t tell.”
“Tell who?”
This was meant to be a joke but sent a jolt of injury through her, that he should regard Josiah with such insouciance. Yet she allowed her father to take her hand and lead her: down the stairs, out the door. She walked toward her house, feeling his eyes on her the whole way. “Go to bed!” he shouted as she opened her door. She flashed him an obedient smile and waved good-bye.
Inside, the air was cool, and slightly dank. It was an odd house, large in the new way but built like one of the older Colonials on Bray or Lufkin, the windows small, the clapboards thin, the floorboards wide and already creaky, built to relieve her father’s embarrassment at having built such an opulent, modern house himself. There was no back door, no way to get down to the bay without her father seeing. Susannah moved slowly up the narrow stairs, the steps disingenuously sized for smaller, centuries-old feet. She paused, thinking of her father’s anger, and of what he would do if he learned about Josiah’s nocturnal flights. He could not possibly understand Susannah’s inaction. She would not understand it if another woman told her: how such a thing could occur and you could just go on, inside and out, as if nothing had changed. It wasn’t that she liked it, or that she hadn’t been glad when for a week or so he seemed to have stopped. And it wasn’t that she felt tepid toward Josiah. He was still the most beautiful man she had met. This morning, half asleep, he had rubbed her shoulders in bed, grunting softly about the water boys wanting raises like their counterparts had gotten at Babson’s, about Sam Turpa’s brother who’d lost his two fingers fishing and needed work, about the Sacco and Vanzetti mess, and she had wanted him awfully, deep in her legs, as badly as she wanted to swim. But that was the biggest no-no, the no-no even Susannah fully believed in, because really how could you have it both ways? She had given him her advice—give them the raises, find the brother a job, but stand (gently) firm against Anarchy disguised as Labor, don’t let your men be seduced, offer a few little perks, a midmorning break, a once-a-month dinner, fire a ringleader or two in warning. She watched him dress. He went down to breakfast and she stayed on her stomach, wishing it were big enough already that she could not lie on it, waiting for desire to drain away.
Susannah was a rational woman. She knew, based on her observations of the world, that a man’s running around was never ended by a wife’s interfering, unless she outright killed him. This was part of what stopped her from accusing and berating Josiah. Also, she had her father’s loyalty, which was intense and pure and had been this way for so long, sitting on her shoulders like a fur, warm but heavy, very heavy, that she did not require loyalty in and of itself—she knew it was not an end. But most powerful was the fact that she blamed Josiah’s behavior on herself. Back when she first spotted him outside the blacksmith shop she experienced her attraction to him simply: the man had the poise of the rugby player with none of the arrogance. Yet something more mercenary had driven her, too, however unaware of it she imagined herself at the time: in Josiah’s innocence, in his willingness to be shaped and molded, she saw the potential for a kind of power, for herself. She had courted him as a man courts, promising wealth, fine clothing, a beautiful house. She had created him, in a sense, set him up to be the sort of man he now was, and he had gone along, bossing at the quarry, running for mayor, and—now—running around on her. Meanwhile she had failed to give him a family. So. How could she blame him? Susannah saw his affair as his right—she saw her ignoring it as a kind of apology.
Slowly up the narrow stairs she went, meeting each foot with the other before attempting another step, like a caricature of a heavily pregnant woman, though she looked the same as she always had. She bent at the knee more than was necessary, so as to feel and use the strength of her thighs. How she wanted to swim! But maybe this was her trouble. Maybe her mother had given up all her strength to Susannah so that Susannah had two times as much as a normal woman, which meant she could swim long distances and endure her husband’s infidelity and bear her own barrenness with equanimity for so many years but not, never, any children. Maybe it was all tangled up like that, one strength another weakness, and if only she could happily lie in bed all day and weep to her husband all night and make him promise never to stray again, her pregnancy would continue, she would not bleed, and the next thing to come out of her would be a child.
She did not believe this. But there was a kind of promise in pretending to believe it, because then, maybe, something could be fixed. From her bedroom window she could see the river opening out to the bay, the tapering white lips of the beaches on either side, Crane and Coffin’s, the dunes. The view was broken by the tops of pine trees, for her father ordered trees cut based on the view from his house, which stood higher on the hill. The trees thrashed in the hot breeze, interrupting the white sand, any idea of true expanse. This was sight in New England, Susannah thought, always broken, hemmed in. Her father had taken them to places where you could see endless sky or mountains wherever you went, but then he had brought her back here.
She climbed into bed and waited for her husband to come home.