August 1952
It was during what they both knew would be their last canoe trip together that Joseph made her promise to live.
“And by live I mean all the way, with all your heart and soul.”
“If there is any of either left,” she said, but she canceled out the rueful words with a broad smile because she would not, could not, had sworn not to since he’d first fallen so ill, give him cause to fear for her.
“My precious Edie,” he said, “you must promise to give yourself entirely to someone or something because that’s who you are. You are a genius at devoting yourself; it’s what makes you happiest.”
“Not to someone,” she said, firmly. “And you may as well not even try to talk me out of that, mister, because you won’t, not if you throw every ounce of your charm at me. You are my only someone. I will stay devoted to you and to no one else, ever. That’s that.”
He eyed her skeptically. “I’m not so sure, but never mind. Something then. Find something. Of course, the world should cherish you in return, but that will take care of itself. Nothing in the wide world is easier than loving you.”
“Says you,” she teased.
Joseph laughed and she could see his features tighten with pain, watched his right hand grope vaguely at his back, felt the canoe move side to side as he shifted his big, newly angular body in search of the comfortable position she knew he wouldn’t find, and there it was: the sensation of spinning on a cliff’s edge, the tearing, metallic screech of losing him forever gripping the back of her throat. She looked away from her husband, squinted at a bird flying low above the water until she felt the canoe’s wobbling cease.
She pointed. “A shearwater. Not a very elegant bird, really, all that stiff-winged teetering, like a seesaw.”
“Unlike you, my elegant bird,” said Joseph, reaching for her hand. She set down her oar and clasped his hand, which had grown thinner but was somehow still square and strong and familiar.
It was she—and not the nurse but the lover—who had noticed the first symptoms: the faint yellowing of his eye whites and skin (she saw it earliest on the pale places untouched by sun, like a pollen stain on the smooth skin across his hip bones and the tops of his thighs), and a new articulation of his ribs and cheekbones and spine and wrists. Such slight changes, but she had taken his body apart—focusing on one tiny piece of him at a time—and put it back together so often, with her camera and her eyes, and had mapped the intricate, stretched-out landscape of him with her own bones and muscles and nerve endings so many times and with such absorption that she detected what most people would have missed.
Still, it wasn’t early enough, not even close—a fact he’d so vehemently forbidden her to torture herself with that she’d complied. Once he began to go down, he went so fast that she began to have dreams of wildfire racing through dense forests, leaving black and skeletal trees, or of a skyscraper being violently dismantled by wind or once, horribly, of a gray whale being torn apart by sharks. Joseph had been so large; the sheer scope of him had dazzled her from the start. To watch that broad, strong body come to ruin, pare down and weaken, was shockingly cruel, but she swore to give him, no matter what, the gift of herself, her usual self, unbroken, composed and joking and observing the world with sharp-eyed curiosity. He should have his wife, she thought, until the very end, and come hell or high water or sorrow like a screaming bird of prey, she would make certain he did.
John Blanchard had helped lower him into the canoe. It was early morning, just after sunrise, the jeweled hour, the sun a liquid-edged apricot, its light pattering like fingertips over the water, the sky a breath of blue. Joseph’s favorite time of day. Edith paddled slowly, then let them just float, suspended between sky and water. She alternated: paddle and float; glide and drift; intention and chance.
Apart from the shearwater, they’d seen few birds, the serenity of the morning punctuated only by two silent flotillas of ducks and one burst of tiny fish skittering like rain across the water. But then, as they rounded a point, they saw them, dozens of them, roosting in the trees, white as laundry: herons, what appeared to be an entire flock.
“I’ve never seen so many together,” whispered Edith. “Never, ever.”
“No, never,” said Joseph.
Absently, enthralled by the birds, she reached up and slid the kerchief off her head, and in an instant, a light wind kicked off the water and caught in her hair, sliding coolness along the back of her neck. Then, like a massive exhale, the flock of herons lifted itself off the branches and threw itself at the sky, the individual birds, their impossible necks, the white drapery of wings becoming a single event, one noisy, snowy, chaotic glory.
When the birds had blown away like a blizzard, at the moment when the air still held their electric memory, Edith and Joseph turned rapt faces to each other, and Joseph said, reverently, “That was you. You, you. That’s what you have been to me. Exactly.”
* * *
After Joseph died, Edith entered a period of freeze. Numb, wooden, blank-eyed, she moved through first his funeral, then the burial in the bean field cemetery in front of the chapel where they’d been married. His mother, Anne, had been there for his last days, stoic and tender, and after his death she had crumbled and clung—childlike, grief-blind—to Edith until the morning after the burial, when Edith woke to the smell of eggs and bacon. Still frozen, Edith applied fork and knife to the meal, directed the food to her mouth, chewed. Afterward, when she tried to thank Anne, she found she couldn’t speak, a condition that lasted for days. So Anne stayed, sat up night after night with her mute, disoriented daughter-in-law, telling her stories about Joseph’s childhood. Edith listened without reacting, but some still-working part of her mind gathered the stories up, put them away for safekeeping, all those small pieces of Joseph ready when she needed them, when she thawed.
Which she did, quite suddenly, ten days later, when she was hanging sheets on the line to dry. The bright, salt-tinged early autumn wind tugged at the sheets, surrounding Edith in the scent of lemon detergent and sending her back to her first time in their house, her bridal afternoon, the smell of lemon oil and Joseph waiting for her in the doorway, and she dropped to her knees, felled by loss, clutching the bundle of damp bed linens to her chest like a baby.
So Anne stayed for two weeks more, until Edith could function again, her brain sorting out the world hour to hour: wake, talk, shower, dress, shop for food, prepare food, eat food, sleep. Anne invited her to come live with her in Ohio, saying they could both use the company.
“Also, life isn’t easy for women on their own, and I can tell you from experience—long-ago experience but I don’t think times have changed much—that small communities like this one can be, well, a little uneasy with beautiful widows.”
Edith understood. She’d already felt the wariness and suspicion behind some of her visitors’ pointed questions about what her “next step” would be. But even so and as grateful as she was for Anne’s offer, she would not leave the house that Joseph had given her, every room of which was a part of him.
“I hate to say this,” said Anne, gently, just before she left, “but you will have to make money. I’ve checked, and you have enough for a few months, but no more. Can you go back to nursing?”
“No,” said Edith, pressing her lips together and shaking her head. “Not after my father and Joseph. I can’t.”
“I understand. So not right away, but soon, sooner than you’ll want to, you’ll have to find something to do.”
Edith put her arms around Anne and pressed her close. “I will,” she said. “I promise.”
Nearly a month later, at the market, a tourist from Pittsburgh visiting with her family in the off-season, a young mother buying milk for her baby, struck up a conversation with Edith.
“It’s only now that we can afford to come, the hotels have gotten so expensive,” said the woman, sighing. “And they aren’t homey, either, all those long hallways, and the lobby where I have to keep the kids in check. One day, we’d love to come in summer, for a whole week even, and stay in a real house, but I don’t suppose we ever will be able to.”
Edith took in the woman’s tired eyes, the resigned set of her shoulders inside her sweater, and an idea struck her with all the force of a revelation. She set down the apple she’d been examining and smiled at the woman.
“Why, I have a guesthouse,” she said. “Short-term boarders only, vacationers. I’m sure we could work out a rate for the summer. May I give you my address and phone number?”
The woman’s wan face lit up. “Well, of all the luck! My goodness. I’ll take all your information down right now!” she exclaimed, opening her handbag to rummage for paper, which she found, and something to write with, which she did not. “Does your establishment have a name?”
Edith imagined her precious house overrun by strangers and found it didn’t hurt. It seemed somehow right. Give yourself to something, Joseph had told her. Maybe this wasn’t it, not quite, but it would do for the moment. She reached into her own handbag, pulled out a pen, and handed it to the woman.
“It does,” she said. “I call it Blue Sky House.”