part0014

Whatever I did in or around the house, this sea called to me, and I garnered my strength before its force. The endless flow of tides. As sure as waves, marriage, and motherhood had passed me by, yet I took on the cycle of life beside the beach. The blood and breath of what I have become. I even dabbled in paint.

The European tour Mother had embarked upon with me on had been no more than ladylike polish to refine me. Her hopes that I’d dazzle suitors with parlor talk to win a husband had been dashed. A virginal sacrifice to the unnamed passion for which I pined. That wealth of art had grown a seed, which, a year—this year—after her death began to blossom. Watercolors didn’t pervade the house with the smell of the oil paint that seemed to be the hallmark of a serious artist. What my grandmother had yearned to be.

Now the palette of my paint box filled with tints of Polly’s auburn hair. A fiery dawn crowned her portrait with its washy tones of flesh. Her face, a mask of shadows below her floppy hat, shifted with the pulse of light.

Whenever Polly left, I wandered like a lost girl with the dog padding behind. I didn’t stop the way she did to pluck Mitzy, the black stray she’d rescued from below the bridge, out of soppy sand. The damned creature lacked sense to skirt puddles, rocks, or clumps of cattails. If only to hush her yippy bark, I would backtrack to wrench her free, a ball of sandy fur. Then I’d let her wander off again. Like my grandmother before me, I had never been maternal.

Yet I was more feminine at forty than Polly, twenty-six, could ever hope to be. A bonnet veiled the golden, silver-tinged twirls of my braids. With my lacy gown and parasol, she’d teased: I looked as though I had stepped out of a Monet. Polly, who’d secretly don Papa’s smoking jacket, might easily pass for a man. Her angled cheeks and hair, styled off her forehead, were more handsome than pretty.

Every time I walked this beach, my thoughts were haunted by her absence. I basked in spectacles of backlit clouds, wings, and stars that infused a solace with their light. Breakers, spilling in a foamy necklace across the shore, lulled me to embrace the silence of our secret love. Our bond, deeper than this mask of sexless friendship, didn’t need to be spoken. Not while we were so close—together and apart.

“She’ll come cheap with nothing but the clothes on her back.” Polly winked. “No doubt she’ll bite her tongue to keep her place.”

I trembled with panic and wonder as the housemaid stomped across my porch. We stared at each other as though through a looking glass. We were nothing alike. I was pale, small-boned and tall, and the woman was short and ruddy, more stout than plump. But we were close enough in age, childless old maids the world had all but erased.

She returned my greeting with a curt nod as she circled me to enter the hall. She ran a finger down the dusty mirror and draped her coat on a tree bench meant for guests. Then she chucked her chin at the parlor door. “Show me into there.” Her gravelly accent struck the air.

I led her, our skirts brushing the floor, and Hilda stepped inside as though she—and not the mask of Polly’s and my silence—commanded the space. As we settled the details of her duties, Hilda interjected with more curt nods.

I lit a candle to guide her down the twisty steps into the kitchen. I pointed out the pantry, and then we wended our way upstairs to the two bedrooms. I shrugged with a devil-may-care gesture each time she clucked her tongue at the clutter. The unpeeled layers of forgotten years.

I left her to inspect every nook and niche from the attic to the cellar. Then she stomped off to entrench herself in the cottage for the night.

She unbuttoned our skirts, which crumpled in a silky trail across the floor. Her nimble fingers unlaced and unhooked our bodices, corsets, and garters. We slipped out of our frilly underskirts, petticoats, and stockings. She stretched across my bed, stripped off her chemise, and drew me down to nestle on her bosom.

Silence and shadows flooded the room. Our bodies, freed from the weighty garments, floated under and over each other like waves crashing to the shore below.

The housemaid wore an apron with a hint of frills that belied her gruff manners. There was nothing frilly about Hilda, whose hair was knotted in a bun that appeared to yank her mouth into a frown. Her thick lips folded along her face as though she held an inner monologue. A behind-the-scenes drama the rest of the world could not be privy to.

“Yet she bakes like a dream.” Polly ran her finger across a plate, spread chocolate on my mouth, and kissed my lips.

I melted like the chocolate with her kiss. Could I deny my Polly anything, even her sweet tooth for Hilda’s cakes?

We read, half dressed, on the rockers before my fireplace, unlit on sultry nights. We savored Sense and Sensibility , our favorite book, until our eyes blinked in sleepy surrender.

Then we quickly unlaced corsets and petticoats, which we tossed into a ruffled heap below my bed. We flung chemises at the brass headboard and I rocked, laughing, in the chair. I curled my toes against the floor as Polly knelt, naked at my feet. Heat fused with our strokes and kisses until I fell back, panting for air. I spread my legs like wings in flight as she climbed on top of me.

My sole wish during those enchanted moments was that Hilda would tiptoe away at dusk. We couldn’t afford a courteous maid, so I checked my tongue. Each night after supper, her heavy footfall faded outside as though she couldn’t wait to take her leave of us. We could barely wait for her to leave, and then we gathered our skirts to trot upstairs.

We dropped onto the bearskin rug before the hearth and the house answered our writhing with creaks across the floor. The sweep of waves across the twilit shore voiced a promise—over and over—of our secret love.

My favorite way to swim is at high tide, flat back and face up to the sky. I flipped my arms like fleshy oars behind my head as currents whisked the world into a tranquil space. Silence mingled with the in-out breath of sea and the endless blue of sky.

The bathing suit, Nana’s without the bloomers, stirred a girlhood memory. I had confused blood rushing in my ears with the lap of waves, and she’d explained in her lilting brogue, another comfort to my ears. “It’s the flow of blood, Jane, telling us the heart is pumping. Steady on, like waves.” I supposed my Nana would have known.

She’d left Granddad to live in this summer home, which appeared offshore as though it might topple into the sea. Grandad had given up the ghost of her after my mother and aunts had begged Nana not to live alone. Why on earth not? She had squandered most of her life on every other need except her own.

“Heartbeat,” she’d told me, “the very first thing we hear, answers child to mother inside the womb.” That made sense even after thirty years—even to a motherless spinster like me.

The world seemed to close its eyes to twilight, the hour of bewitching magic. I imagined twinkling lights across the harbor, from lanterns or electric bulbs, to be faeries at play. Then it struck me how witches had burned, not a league from these shores, for less than our sacred bond. A decade into this new century, a lapse from secrecy would plunge Polly and me into poverty. A punishment of our freedoms—my home, painting, our girlish daydreams beside the sea—sucked dry by our breach from society. No! Voicing our love had never been a choice.

We let silence weave itself between our panting and the crash of waves. Washed away in pleasure or the heartache of our days apart, silence languished from dusk into night.

Hilda unearthed a painting from the musty cellar and stomped with it into the parlor. I squinted at the self-portrait, a profile, of my grandmother, a free spirit who’d studied art before her marriage. Brushstrokes feathered her cheek with a rosy tint that faded into gray. Varnish drowned the impressionistic hues she had gushed over in Boston.

Polly thought we might sell the painting and wanted it appraised. “It was collecting dust in the cellar,” she said with an offhand shrug.

Hilda, who waited in the silence, held the frameless canvas with a firm but tender grasp. Polly pursed her lips and I crossed my arms as though to dam the rage from spilling out of my gut onto the rug.

Without a word, Hilda mounted a stool to hang the portrait above the mantel. The framed daguerreotype of my parents on the mantel shrank below the painting’s shadow. Nana’s visage, if only in her lively eye, seemed to rouse my memories of a freer time. Of girlhood hopes.

The golden fabric of autumn unraveled itself to a thread of early winter. Dusk engulfed our bodies in shimmering red as we kissed, naked before the fire. We stumbled, breathless, into bed where the harvest sunset swathed our bodies, glistening with light and sweat.

Afterwards we bathed, taking turns to sponge each other in the tub Hilda had filled between our rooms. We dried off and then slipped into our separate beds, me in mine and her in my parents’ bed—into the silence of our different dreams.

I awakened to spy Hilda filling the basin and taking the chamber pot away. She tiptoed back with the cleansed pot and to place lilac in a vase atop my dresser. The lap of waves stirred a hint of brine that mingled with the scent of freshly washed garments. One sensation lacking, I yearned to greet the day wrapped up in my lover’s arms.

Hilda was an early riser and Polly feared the risk of her finding us together in my bed. The woman’s English was keener than we’d realized, sharp enough to grasp and to gossip: Polly and I were so much more than friends.

Polly left again and I quibbled with Hilda about nitpicky things. She ought to use less oil and hang fewer lanterns above the stairways—inside and out. She countered with quibbles of her own. There was never enough money to spare for butter or eggs to bake her rich desserts.

The last straw, she grumbled about how the cabinets hung “too crooked” off their hinges. I plunked my paintbrush into a ginger jar of water and marched with her downstairs. Just as I’d secretly rebelled against my mother, I stuck my tongue at Hilda’s back.

“Hallo? Fix them if they trouble you so much,” I snapped and then tilted my head to squint. The cabinets, peeling with grayish paint, were noticeably off-kilter.

“Do I look a Jesus Christ to you?” She gaped as though horrified by the suggestion. “I am not any miracle maker.”

“Yet you’re loud enough to be a carpenter.” I thrust my hands against my hips to defy her stony gaze. “You stomp like a hammer up and down the steps.”

Her eyes softened with a grin on her lips, which she began to draw into the usual frown. A sulky pout formed instead and “Humph” was all she said before slapping open the cellar door. She squeezed her bulk and, with quieter footsteps, vanished down the stairs.

I gathered my skirts and scurried to retreat into the parlor. At length, the bang—a hammer, no doubt—reverberated throughout the house. Unable to concentrate on painting, I rubbed my throbbing temples and waited out the noise. No matter.

I veiled my love for Polly in painting the way Jane Austen had hidden words behind needlework. She’d masked her extraordinary gift, frowned upon in women, from off-and-on guests; my paintings, nowhere near extraordinary, engaged the prying eyes of neighbors and my distant kin.

Polly left after the first of the month to pass the holidays—Thanksgiving through New Year—with her farmer folks.

“Why so soon?” I asked the darkness as I tossed alone in bed. “When cold is setting in and I need you here most?” Why this wanton abandonment?

A lonely month stretched like the barren beach ahead of me. I wrapped up in Nana’s woolen cloak and must have appeared theatrical as I haunted the shore. The dog shivered in my arms but somehow the biting wind had no effect on me.

I walked the beach at different times: beneath a muted or a fiery dawn or dusk; in misty or radiant moonlight, fanned out across waves and shore. Snow settled around dunes, dips, and my boot steps, and stippled the sand like lace on golden flesh. A scarlet sunrise, crisp midday blue, or deep purple of encroaching night painted the sky. Water swirled and frothed with myriad reflections and my mind’s eye awakened to the play of light.

I shredded her Seasons Greeting card, imprinted with a scene of skating children, and tossed it to the waves. …shame…secret…keep. I searched through moist eyes for other words—love…promise…forever —that had graced Polly’s lips, if not her script. But they didn’t float up inside some bottled message from across the sea. Perchance they never would.

“I did not cross this ocean for you to punish with your heartbreak!” She brusquely swept the ashes into a pail and then stomped down to the kitchen.

Soon, the aroma of chocolate wafted upstairs, tantalizing my senses to summon buried memories. Hadn’t Mother and I baked, puttered in the garden, or combed for shells and pebbles on the beach? “Gifts from the sea,” she’d called them.

Like a greedy child, I relished every morsel of that scrumptious cake. Then, out of sheer delight for Hilda’s treat, I swallowed my pride and apologized.

What Nana called Women’s Christmas was, for us, what spouses call anniversary, that Sunday of our first year together. Polly and I celebrated alone. A third class ticket—the best gift I could afford—had taken Hilda by Pullman, the white ghost train, to visit her sister.

We basked in the quiet and, after a supper of my pasty soup, we stepped onto the veranda. The swing jerked under us as waves whipped into a blackened fury that spit out splashes. We lingered long enough to hurl strained laughter at the sea.

Startled into anger, I wanted to spit like the sea. Didn’t she see how I missed the lively theaters, cafes, and the museum where we’d met? “We could never live as secret lovers in the warm city.”

Icy snow began to pelt across the railings and we scurried into the parlor. After bolting the veranda doors, I raced to latch shutters around the house. Upstairs, we stripped out of our wet garments down to our chemises. Then we burrowed with the dog beneath the quilt my mother had stitched by hand. Its matching curtains had been sold to pay for wood.

Neither of us stirred to rekindle the fire after its embers had died. Wind shrieked like the banshee of my grandmother’s folktales as Polly wriggled out of our clothed embrace. Her shadow shrank across the floor planks until she disappeared behind the door.

My watercolors, like our love, fell flat, and I needed to embrace the failure of what I’d never be—not mother, not artist, not lover. The unbroken span of sand and sea had always felt too wide, too open. I couldn’t bring such bigness to life, so I confined myself to still life, household portraits I squinted through spectacles to capture.

Polly, whose allowance had dwindled, crumpled a letter to toss it over the fire screen. “Pa wants me to marry.”

“Are you a head of cattle your father needs to auction off?” I sunk into the dip on my end of the faded chaise.

She pursed her lips, and I shivered below the rattling dormer window. The attic was our last retreat where she insisted we hide to make love. She didn’t say what, in this godforsaken place, we were hiding from.

An automobile clattered across the bridge and down the marshy road to whisk her away. What could be so special that her father’s horse and buggy wouldn’t do? Had a meeting to strike up a match with the farmer neighbor been arranged?

Heartache bubbled with outrage in my chest and I glared at her belly. “Act quickly before your childbearing years crash to an end.”

She slapped me, planted a sloppy kiss on my mouth, and then clambered toward the stairs. Her footsteps wound down and down until I heard the front door slam. I clutched my cheek. Like countless slaps I had borne from my mother’s hand—every time I’d jilted another suitor—Polly’s hand numbed my face and heart.

Unsure which I hated more—her slap or kiss—I flung open the trunk Nana had brought from outside Dublin. What she’d called beyond the pale. I tugged out her wedding dress—the one Mother had saved for me to marry in—and its sleeves enfolded me with lace as I drew them around my back.

I pried caps off paints, miraculously, not fully dried, and rubbed brushes with linseed oil, bending them into pliant tips. Cradling paints and brushes in the folded dress, I stomped down to the parlor. Then I hitched my skirts to run upstairs to drag the easel, its back leg bumping along the steps.

Somehow I needed to voice in paint what I had never dared to speak. I faced Nana’s profile like a talisman and, spellbound, gazed into her painted eye—green like mine. A glimmer of the hope that had been snuffed out with her haunted life still sparkled there.

I rummaged through Mother’s sewing kit for scissors to deftly cut a heart-shaped card. I wouldn’t risk the postal service and meant to hand the card to Polly if ever she returned. I penned Our twain hearts seal this promise, strongholds in a world that mocks our love between the doubled hearts. Then I signed Forever yours! J. D. in my best flowing cursive.

My brush dropped, splattering paint around the Turkish rug, as I darted toward a shriek. Hilda had slid across the veranda and crashed onto the snowy beach. I found her, doubled up with a shard of glass from the shattered lantern stuck into her thigh.

She shrieked again as I jiggled the shard free. I padded her apron to staunch the gush of blood and then bounded, losing my slippers in snow, across the yard. I yanked the barn doors, startling the cow and chickens I’d bought to stop Hilda’s nagging me for dairy. I tugged shaggy Ol’ Nel, who curled her lip with a cranky neigh, over to the sleigh. There was no time to blanket the mare or dust the crackled seat, and I fumbled with shaky fingers to hitch the horse onto the sleigh.

Then I gripped the reins to lead Nel, whinnying all the way, down a loopy path of snow and sand. I hoisted Hilda, twice my size, who pushed upward with a brawny arm, into the sleigh.

“Doc Cherby’ll set that fracture,” I said to console her and to ease my guilt. Perchance she’d have found her footing if I had spared more oil for the lanterns.

Cattails bowed with winter stiffness beside the road and mists billowed before the sleigh, which jingled with its strap of bells. I wrapped my bare feet in a rag below the seat and my gloveless fingers chilled around the reins. I squinted at the road. Hazy lights appeared to flit in mist as I strained to steer in their direction.

Why am I doing this? Hilda was neither kin, nor friend, nor lover to me. Struck by my own heartlessness, I shook my head as though to fling the thought onto the icy road.

The horse clomped over the bridge, bumpy with snow, and Hilda’s groans rang out with her frosty breath. The road grew smoother where neighbors had plowed and she began to mutter sharply in her native tongue. Cursing herself and me, no doubt. I half smiled, bemused to think of how—this once—I held the reins over my gritty housemaid.

Dawn, a rising beacon to guide us home, wove its light between the branches. Hilda’s curses had given way to rhythmic moans as she rocked across the seat. I rapped her hand each time she rubbed the cast, which hadn’t fully set, and, spurring the horse onward, I steeled myself against fear. Although Doc had used antiseptic, it was too soon to tell if she’d recover from the gash beside her vein.

I rounded a bend to swerve the sleigh around a sunken dip in the road. The circular plot of my family’s gravestones jutted, white against white, out of snow. Moonlight spiraled across the field, a last fetal stage before night was birthed into the day.

She only called me ma’am or Miss Devine in Polly’s or a guest’s presence now. Her Christian name, she’d told me, was Clothilda, which meant battle maid. Small wonder.

She squeezed my elbow with a feebleness that belied her stoic nature, and then she recounted her story in a fragile voice. “The blame was all mine, this…lady tossed us into the night.”

“My sister, just little at that time, got sick on the streets.” Her brow creased with folds that rippled on her forehead. “We became two beggars, almost starved to death.”

“That crass woman was no lady.” I flinched. What do I know of ladies? The scrape must have taken place in Germany when they had both been girls. “How was that your fault?”

She bowed her head and a muted chuckle sounded from beneath her scarf. “Here it is me alone. There I had my dead mother’s only other child to think of.” Raven hair streamed through her fingers as she clutched her face. “It was not alone…me.”

“You meant to say only me.” I eyed her with a sideways glance as I pulled the reins to slow Nel. Then I abruptly turned to study Hilda’s face. Her profile, softened in dreamy moonlight, appeared comely. Almost sweet.

“Yes. At long last.” She bobbed her head emphatically. “I slaved in a laundry to pay her medicine and a ship to bring us here. But can you not see?” Her knuckles whitened as she gripped my arm. “I…we must have another to care of but ourselves.”

The reins drooped, slung from my numbed fingers to the arc of the sleigh. As the horse clomped across the moonlit bridge, I was struck by the notion that I’d crossed a gap between our worlds. Hilda’s and mine.

“I gave her a sip of whiskey to ease the pain,” I said. “No more. Other than that, I’ve never seen her touch a drop.”

Unlike Polly, who quaffed my father’s store of cellar wine. She had polished off a cask and was drunk more often than not these days. What Granddad would have called pretty well over the bay.

“She may walk again.” I lightened my tone but narrowed my eyes at Polly, who’d lost the gumption even to cower in the attic to make love.

Something shifted in the deepening silence of those chilly days. We wore the masks of our pretense but she no longer stole kisses nor entered my room to embrace me at night. Our footsteps dragged to a less than brisk pace to greet each other at dawn. My Valentine card, which I offered without the flutter of my former passion, sparked no warmth on her behalf.

Without Hilda’s unflagging energy, the house grew cluttered and I could barely paint amidst the chaos. My sigh dwindled to more silence as I watched Polly pack her bag to leave again. Unlike the thawing beach, our bliss remained frozen with unspoken memories.

Doc sawed off Hilda’s cast and I kept a watchful eye on the tender wound. She could just about take the stairs on crutches to crawl into Polly’s bed. Each morning and night, I washed and dressed the gash she strained to lift her leg for me to reach. I rolled her onto and off of the chamber pot, which I rinsed between our rooms. She struggled to sit up for me to spoon my bland soup into her mouth. She cringed, wrinkling her face with a look of disgust, but sipped without complaint.

Her smiles became less rare and the odd grin flickered on her lips. Guilt ridden and torn, I’d look away. Should I send her to her sister’s in New York? If only to appease Polly enough to bring her home?

I plodded down to the parlor to stare at a blank canvas but nothing answered there. I didn’t bother to lift my brushes out of the mucky can of oil. A numbness crept over me as I let my gaze wander from where I knocked back Granddad’s whiskey on the sofa. How pointless. I plunked down the glass and the amber liquid splashed brushes, palette, and squeezed-out paints across the table.

Although neighbors offered to pay for portraits, without Polly, my muse, how could I create? Wasn’t she the breath of my brush? Ordinary objects—the teapot, the curve of a spoon, sugar stacked in a pyramid of white—had always caught my eye. Their flair could only be captured with her, if not in the parlor, then somewhere inside the house.

Like an aimless ghost, I passed through the rooms that had become my tomb. A chasm of aloneness I hadn’t felt since my mother’s death filled me like the earth they’d pitched into her grave. I pictured Mother, thrashing on her deathbed, and was overcome by the sheer agony of losing Polly.

I trained my eyes on the sea, which seemed to swallow itself in a crush of black waves. I stumbled over the rocks that had reminded my grandmother of her homeland. Boireann. I reached the outmost algae-laced rock and faced the waves until they slapped me to my knees. My hair and clothes dripped like the paint of my body, blending into a canvas of sea.

The orphan voice from the night I’d driven the sleigh to town struck out of the fog. The sky answered with a shout of thunder that sent the dog, who sprang on her haunches, scrambling toward the beach.

“I’m going to swim.” I scanned the water to fix on a cresting wave. Then I stripped out of Nana’s wedding dress and flung it from the rocks. Wind tossed the dress in a swirl of white that rode the air until it vanished into fog.

“A storm is about to come.” Hilda picked her way, shifting her bum leg between the rocks, to meet me on the edge. Her nightdress fluttered with frills and her unpinned hair twirled with wisps against the wind. “Will you die to swim today?”

Lightning unveiled a horizon of clouds that feathered the sky like graceful fingers. An artist’s hand? Another roar of thunder, wind, and waves fused with the immense silence in my head. My braids clung to my cheek as I glanced across my shoulder. “My life is worthless without love.”

“Your life is worth better than the love she hid from you.” Hilda’s eyes, moist with seawater or tears, were creased with a look of deep concern. She chucked her chin at me with a soft smile, softer than I’d ever seen, that lit her countenance. “Come home, Jane.”

I turned slowly as though some force behind the raging sky guided my motion—an invisible force that wanted me to live. Then I reached for the stout lifeline of Hilda’s outstretched hand.

“When in April the sweet showers fall/That pierce March’s drought to the root and all.” Nana’s leather bound Chaucer, albeit thumbed and yellowed with age, pacified me into a newborn spring. And the last thing I’d imagined, imagination being my strongest suit, Hilda whipped me into shape. A lifeless lump of paint, I felt myself being brushed with her strokes across the canvas of my soul.

Polly mailed my Valentine with a last harsh note and I watched the papers burn to crumbles in the fireplace. I gathered ashes of the heart along with her scribbly writing—God and man…disgrace of our bond…a sham— and flung them to the waves. A sacrificial offering of what she could never have been to me. Not in any genuine way.

It was all I could do to keep up the prim appearance of the parlor to sell my portraits. Not everyone cottoned to this modern clamor for photography and neighbors, especially mothers with children, paid calls for sittings.

I rolled up my sleeves, tucked in my skirts, and dropped to the floor by her side. Why should Hilda, the most genuine soul I knew, grovel alone in crippled servitude? She could just about limp with a cane, yet we scrubbed, swept, buffed, and dusted.

Now we only quibbled over fiery things like where more lanterns ought to hang and when the fireplaces should be lit. I said early. She said late.

I rented it to a troupe of actors who spilled with their children across the beach. The noisy chaos was just the challenge my Hilda needed to get back on her feet.

We’d carted my easel, paints, books, and quilt, if not my comfy bed, over to the cottage. Its two rooms were enough for us along with one yippy little dog. My brush, flowing with viscous paint, was infused by the fragrance of oils and by my lightened spirit. I promised myself to create a summertime of seascapes—not for money. Harking back to my girlhood days, I painted for myself again.

She stroked my naked body. Her work-worn fingers were rough yet their tenderness shot tingles of pleasure through my flesh. Her lips, surprisingly supple, sucked my breasts in turn and I rose with moans to meet her hungry mouth.

I was too lost in sheer delight to ask what she knew. Something about my history with Polly, no doubt; something I no longer felt the need to voice. Not now. Not within the hush of our tiny bedroom, white with the blankness of my cleansed soul. The view from the small window straggled out of marsh into the harbor. I snuggled on the pillow of Hilda’s chest and closed my eyes. The crash of breakers, the blend of salty air with pine, and the caw of gulls seemed to fade along with memories.

Did I barter one mask for another? More than likely, yes. Unlike Polly, who’d succumbed to the sham of marriage and an acceptable home, this secret life with Hilda was a mask I freely chose. Ours was a promise I embraced with outspread arms and legs—wide and opened like the sea.