All morning Beatrice felt as though she were being dreamed by someone else. “There came a day at summer’s full, entirely for me,” she thought, stepping out onto the wide gray boards of the front porch of the big house, coffee cup in hand, remembering some lines from her favorite poet, Miss Emily Dickinson. Or for you, she thought. You, Dreamer, wherever, whoever, you are.
The Rancocas silvered with June heat. Around her lay the quiet Close, caught in a spell of stasis. Or was it stirring? Just two days before, Beatrice and her husband Blue and her older brother Cole and a few friends and distant relations—the Ebles, Bea’s childhood friend Maurice, who’d grown up on a neighboring property, and Maurice’s two young sons and new bride—had buried her mother across the river in the Riverside Lutheran church-yard, beside her father and his parents, in the plot her great-grandfather had bought for the Schade family in a previous century. Two unused plots remained, thick with matted grass beneath a brilliant brocade of elm shadow—for herself and her brother Cole, she guessed, the last of the Schades her ancestor had accounted for, though probably Beatrice would at some future time lie with Blue and the other Wells clan, now that she was married and living closer to them, and despite the fact—to the barely disguised disapproval of Blue’s folks—that she’d not given up her own surname. Cole lived in Virginia; that’s how Bea had met Blue, she in school there at a small women’s college close by the University where her brother and Blue had belonged to the same fraternity and gone to law school.
Cole had pushed off right after the funeral lunch that Bea had arranged at the Close, crab salad sandwiches and champagne, Cole already drunk by noon, chain-smoking and never one much for people in recent years, mumbling about his real estate dealings in the south and making promises to Bea and Blue that he’d help see to the Land Use permit, to finding tenants maybe, and other legalities for the Close. Putting his degree to use. This very morning, while she’d pretended to sleep, Blue had risen before dawn to ride with Brut and catch a train back to New York, where work on a particularly thorny entertainment property case of some sort had kept him away from their home in a Maryland suburb for most of this past year, the first year of their marriage.
Beatrice hadn’t minded. She’d liked being alone in their small ranch house, was used to solitude, didn’t easily make or particularly need friends, and lived near enough to take a bus into the District to visit the monuments, the museums and stores, whenever she wanted to. And the Maryland suburbs also put her a couple hundred miles away from her mother, with whom Bea had never been close and who had lost her mind to dementia. She hadn’t even known who Beatrice was on her wedding day. Still, Beatrice had wanted the ceremony held at the Close, on the front lawn, under the plane trees, her mother in a wheelchair, looked in upon daily by Ida and attended by the two nurses, women from Delanco, who had taken turns caring for her in the house for many years, and who—although she, the elder Mrs. Schade, had long ago forgotten that she had been an alcoholic—still enjoyed having a glass of bourbon and ginger passed beneath her nose every evening before supper.
For the first time, perhaps ever, Beatrice Schade was completely alone in the old house where she’d been raised until she was sent away to school. Though she loved the house, admired its strangeness—that old pear tree, rooted in the deeps of the earth and shooting right up the middle of it, the rotting casks of wine in the cellars, the sheds with their stench of yeast and haymow—she also never felt that the place had wanted her in return. Free of parents at last, free—for a while—of her husband, Bea felt the ancient tree trunk in the house behind her and the musky river and the sweet corn-silk heat before her seep into her, dilating the world she’d always felt had never been hungry enough to love her back.
On that morning after her mother’s funeral, alone on the Close, grown-up Bea, married Bea, set forth. It was her girlhood path she took, the morning charmed around her, in the wake of her fresh losses and in a full flush of freedom and longing she had not anticipated and could not explain. But when she got to the scrap of woods that led to Ida and Brut’s, instead of taking the path to the marina, she veered off into the understory, in the direction of the vineyard. Sweating, holding up her dress hem, and swatting gnats and flies off her bare legs, she skirted the slope, many of the vineyard’s double-curtain and single trellises long fallen, but some of the vines and spurs still quick and spiraling, a few nodes, green clusters of fruit here and there. Insects. A motorboat snarling on the river. Up a small rise she went, across a thicket of bay and locust trees, the privet hedges a trench of camphor, and into a clearing.
Otto was standing outside the small house, as though waiting for her.
“It’s you.”
“Yes. I came—”
“Your mother. I heard. I am sorry.”
His voice was rusty, perhaps from little use or something caught in his throat, and he must by now be somewhere in his fifties, but his eyes were still kind, an icy blue-gray, like the eyes of a wolf Beatrice had seen once penned in a zoo.
“I actually came to see—,” she began.
“It’s still here, look.”
Otto bent to unlatch and lift the painted slatting beneath his porch and withdrew a plank of wood, perhaps an old cupboard door or shutter, and on top of it something about the size of a bushel basket draped beneath a piece of oil cloth.
He placed this board on the porch. Beatrice stepped closer as he lifted the oiled fabric with a tenderness his large scarred hands belied. And there it was, the grapevine and sapling-wattled doll’s house she had fashioned the summer she’d turned ten, its jumble of twigs and leaves and twine now blowsy, mouse-nested, but mostly intact.
That was the summer she’d been left almost entirely alone, turned nearly feral, those last three months of her father’s final illness, and she’d ranged through parts of the Close that were unknown even to her, squatting to pee and shit in the woods, eating raw corn from the cob, teeth full of silk, devouring peaches she picked up off the ground or tugged down from the trees, sometimes without hands, like a deer, her mouth sticky, stained with fruit stones, grape-skins, and soil.
She’d started building the doll house when she’d come upon a large felled tree, its roots dendritic, the trunk hollow. She’d peered inside, brushing aside a thick spider web that stuck to one side like a theater curtain. After that it had been something to do, to gather sticks, truss them up with grapevine and later with string from home, making walls with strips of bark, lining the floors with carefully transferred mosses. A house in a tree, she’d thought to herself. Like a tree in a house.
She’d begun it there, in the mouth of the felled tree at first, but when her little house got too big for that space, she’d carefully moved the construction to one side of the fallen trunk. After a spell of heavy storms, though, that kept her indoors, she’d returned to the woods to find her fairy house mostly demolished, so she began re-building, more ambitiously, adding rooms, a lean-to. Clothespins pocketed from Ida’s became a family. Two wine corks from the cellar and stuck with toothpicks were corgis, like those that attended the young English princess. Then one day, about a week after her father’s death, during which time she’d been away from the woods, she arrived to find erected over her little house a sturdy pavilion, constructed of 20-inch high polished bamboo stilts holding up an elaborately folded coral, skirted tent of pleated, waxed fabric, beaded with dew.
Now Otto was saying, “Come inside, Beatrice, if you want, I’ve still got the rest of it.”
There, in Otto’s dark front room that was also the workroom, on a side table, was the orange paper pavilion.
“And you still have them,” she said, “the little umbrellas you made for the family!” They were lined up on a shelf, miniature like the ones in exotic cocktails, but made of saffron and rose silks and bamboo toothpicks.
“That’s when I first saw you,” she said. “Well, first I saw your feet. Shoes, I mean.” She smiled at him. “I’d climbed up through the woods after Father died, and was kneeling beside my little house, marveling at its tent that seemed to have dropped like Aladdin’s carpet from the sky. Then those two old shoes beside me and you, standing there above me, both hands bristling with little fairy umbrellas. It was so—charming. I wasn’t the least afraid.”
“No.”
The magic of Otto’s place steeped back into her. The ceiling low and hung with oriental parasols, upside down, like lanterns. Shelves of flat luxurious papers, bundles of bone, bamboo, and metal ribs, wood carving tools, brown glass jars of long-congealed mastic, huge shears fit for the large hands of men like Otto’s now dead uncle Harald, who was still alive back then but spoke little English and sat quietly, a corner cipher in a blue smock, and of Otto himself, kindly maker of fanciful toys for a lonely child, the worktable always pushed under the window. A cat watched from the windowsill. The cuckoo clock, still broken, hands fixed at 3:30, still hung beside the door to the small bedroom, its carved leaves and iron pine-cone pendulums motionless and calm.
“Now you are married.”
“Yes.”
“You left after that summer.”
“After Father died. To school. Mother sent me. Then off to college, you know. Down South. Do you know, every Friday for a long, long time I remembered that you sometimes called me ‘Friday.’ I’d said to you, ‘because I visit you on Fridays?’ And you said no, like ‘Friday,’ in the book about the shipwrecked man. You confused me because I came almost every day that summer to see you and the fairy house, not just Fridays.”
“Ja. Yes.”
“‘I so earnestly longed for somebody to speak to.’ That is what you said.”
“Did I. Like that, exactly?” Otto smiled at her.
“I was only ten then. Now I’m 21. I’ve read the book.”
“Have you, then.”
“I have,” she said.
Then Bea knelt, arranging the full circle of her skirt in a fan on the floor as she did so. She took her time. Otto didn’t move. Slowly, with hands trembling but also deliberate, she properly unfolded and then folded up again the hems of each of his trouser legs. Lint in there. Grass. Colored thread. Twigs. She brushed this out first. Two folds back up. She untied the laces of his old-fashioned leather shoes. He let her pull them off, holding his ankles as she did so. Then the socks, woolen even in this weather. She lowered her mouth to the tender oyster of flesh that floats above the sole and just beneath the inner ankle bone. First the right foot, then the left, with all of the long-pent gratitude for being so long ago seen and cared for that she could muster.
*
Blue’s business kept him away in the city, and Bea stayed on at the Close. Blue was, truth be told, still a stranger to Bea. Handsome, urbane, savvy with money, he had seemed to want to marry her to complete some sort of picture he had of himself, of what his, what their life should be. She’d been drawn along into it, not wanting to return home after school, not sure what her degree in English Literature would allow her to do anyway. Blue had been a friend of her brother Cole, and it had all just sort of happened. Marrying Blue had felt like the safe, the inevitable course, and since by this time he was traveling many days out of every month, that year of conjugal life had been bearable.
It was by now mid-July and the old bottling shed was warm with winey heat and a faint, sweet trace of horse stalls. Otto and Beatrice pushed closed the big door, large enough to let a flat truck or tractor through, but Otto had opened a window, little more than a square cut into the wall that swung into the room and closed with a wooden peg, up in the loft where they’d made a pallet of quilts. In the gloom below them, the old winepress that Bea, when she was a girl, thought looked like a giant wooden screw, stood, totemic, with outstretched arms. Shelves of barrels. Vinegar-bitten oak casks. Dust-grimed empties. A few drunk flies.
Bea lay on her stomach examining a pile of books Otto had brought for her. “I’ve read this one,” she said, pointing lazily toward a spine lettered with Far From the Madding Crowd. She pulled another from the stack, Gothic lettering on the worn paper cover. “Das Stundenbuch . . .,” she began, trying out her German. Behind her Otto was pushing up her dress, gently tugging down what was beneath. “Wait,” she said, pointing to the damp, rust-red string between her legs. “Started this morning,” she said. He shook his head. “This may hurt,” he said, “I’m sorry Beatrice.” He always called her by her full name. “Beatrice,” he said again, pronouncing each syllable, licking a thumb to find another way, exploding almost before he was inside her. And, true, it had hurt. But it had also been so enthralling for them both that they made love again this way again twice more before the loft began to turn gold, and evening stepped in fully to claim the summer day.