Ida woke again in the night, imagining sounds. Footsteps. Knocking. She and Bett and the gun made another circuit that revealed nothing, and Ida finally had to face up to a new groundless edginess in her, caused by . . . what? She’d never been so edgy when Ezra had gone off and she’d been alone. What had changed? The gold. It came to her as she returned to her bedroom and crossed by the closet to her bed. Ezra had been hiding that gold from someone, and now she’d decided that someone had come looking. But no one had. There were no footsteps, no knocking, no anything. Ida snuggled in with Bett and fell asleep only to wake an hour later to another sound that proved to be a branch ticking against a downstairs window.
Despite her fatigue the next morning, Ida would have returned the bicycle right then if Hattie hadn’t called to say that Ruth was waiting with a contract for her to sign. This time there was no one digging holes in the yard; she asked Ruth as soon as they’d settled at the table, “Where’s Oliver?”
“At the exchange with Hattie. I told her, ‘I’ve raised my child.’”
Ida only hoped she hadn’t said it in front of the boy, but it was a thin hope. Ruth pushed the paper across the table to Ida. Ruth had kept to Ida’s figure regarding the percentage on the wool profits but declared it forfeit if Ida lost more than two sheep at lambing time.
“Six,” Ida said.
“Three.”
“Five.”
They went back and forth, Ruth growing heated, Ida staying calm, until the calmness wore Ruth down. They settled on no more than four lambs lost, but no matter the loss, 20 percent of the profits at the livestock sale. Ida made sure to include the provision that her presence at the farm was not required beyond the wool sale.
As Ida rose to leave, Ruth said, “You were seen.”
“Seen?”
“You and that Barstow. Out riding around on bicycles.”
“He’s teaching me.”
“The bicycle is bad enough. Displaying your posterior like that. Skirts flying every which way. And then the matter of you barely widowed and him a married man.”
“So. No need to worry, then.”
Ruth stood up out of her chair and pointed at Ida. The storm that roiled her features took Ida aback. “I should like to know what your mother was thinking when she raised you up. Have you never heard the word manners? Or are you too ignorant to know what the word means? I won’t have you dishonoring his memory by getting called harlot all over town. Do you hear?”
If there was one word Ida knew growing up it was the word manners, and in particular, manners when applied to one’s elders. And it was true, there was a time when Ida would never have spoken to someone like Ruth the way Ida now spoke to her. But somewhere along the way, after Ida’s parents had died, after she’d married Ezra, after she’d been snapped at by Ruth too many times to count, it had occurred to Ida that manners traveled in both directions. If Ruth wished to ignore the rules when she spoke to Ida, Ida could bloody well ignore them when she answered back. But what was the point—or better put, the gain—in jousting with Ruth? There was no need for another retort. There was only need for feet on the ground. Ida left.
On Wednesday one of the ewes aborted. Ida knew because of the bloody tail, but she called Lem anyway to be sure. He cleaned up the animal and came in to wash; he looked at her shelves—all three painted now, and the splashboard and the stool—but said nothing. Ida wished he had—she was still trying to decide if she wanted to paint the table and chairs.
“I hear you’re signing on with Ruth,” Lem said. He paused. “I hear other things too.”
“If from Ruth, I hope you know enough—”
“He has a wife, Ida.”
“Who does?”
“Are you getting cute with me now?”
“I’ve already had this talk with Ruth, Lem. First it’s bicycling isn’t ladylike—”
“It isn’t. Coming up that track to see you sprawled in the dirt—”
“I must say I’d expected better of you, Lem.”
“I might say the same of you, Ida.”
Ida went to the door and opened it. “Thank you for stopping by.”
“Only because there’s nothing for him to do while I’m working,” Hattie said. “And you seem to have free time on your hands.” She looked without looking at the bicycle leaning against the barn. Ida had never seen anyone master the look-without-looking as well as Hattie; the eyes didn’t shift directly left but rotated upward as if looking for rain, only sliding sideways on the way back down. But she wanted to ride that bicycle as much as Ida had; Ida could feel it. Since the day of the contract Ida had come to think something better of Hattie; she’d also come to think something worse of Hattie’s life, stuck there with Ruth except for those few days of freedom at the telephone exchange. “I’ll give you a lesson on your way home,” Ida said.
“Would you?”
“I must warn you, your mother won’t like it. Or Lem Daggett, for that matter, but he doesn’t count.”
Hattie’s gaze drifted from Ida to Oliver, who had run from the dog pen to the sheep pasture, scattering the sheep to the far end. He wandered next to Ida’s herb garden and started digging up the dirt with his boot.
“You’ll mind him?” Hattie asked.
“Don’t they have dirt at the telephone exchange?” But just then Ida noticed the perfect curve of Oliver’s neck as he bent over the ground, and the way the sun backlit his ear, turning it into a translucent shell. Perhaps she could sketch Oliver, paint Oliver, while he was distracted with his digging. “I’ll mind him,” Ida said.
Ida handed Oliver the bucket of corn and led him to the chicken house. She showed him how to scatter the corn on the ground and to watch his feet as he did it. When the chickens were all busy pecking up corn kernels she walked Oliver into the coop and showed him how to feel in the nests for the eggs; winter production was slow, but Oliver located three eggs and set them meticulously in the basket. Next she took him to the pasture fence to look over the sheep.
“We do this every day,” she said. “Even if it’s cold, or raining, or snowing, or—”
“Hailing?”
“Hailing,” Ida said. “We look over the flock to see if any are limping or sluggish—”
“What’s sluggish?”
“Moving slowly. Head hanging. Not eating. Lying down.”
“That one’s lying down.” Oliver ran along the fence to get closer to the resting sheep and spooked it into rising and trotting off. He raced back to Ida. “Not sluggish?”
“No.”
He wanted to know the mother and father of the sheep who ran off, and when Ida realized she knew who the mother was, she felt proud. She pointed to the ram in his paddock. “He’s not the father of any of these sheep but he’ll be the father of all the lambs born this year.”
“Where’s these sheep’s father?”
“Sold. You can’t keep the same father year after year.”
“Why not?”
Ida wasn’t up to explaining about inbreeding. “It’s the rule,” she said, which for some odd reason seemed to satisfy the boy. He went back to his hole and Ida went inside to finish her wash, but when she looked out and saw the same intense pose she’d noticed earlier she picked up her pad and charcoal and positioned herself at the window. The curve of his head and neck were easy enough, the shell-like shape of the ear, but she couldn’t get the desperate clench of the fingers around the stick because they kept shifting, and although she knew just what she wanted to do with the light, the charcoal wouldn’t capture it. It would serve as a study for a watercolor, though, or even a pastel . . . Ida was making notes along the edge of the pad when the telephone rang.
“Morgan’s brought up a load,” Henry said.
They stood in front of a mountain of blackened junk now piled on the warehouse floor. “Morgan said he’d take the capstan, winch, anchor, and chain as his share. The rest is ours.”
“The rest of what?” Ida kicked aside what looked like part of a galley stove, extracted a bulbous, black orb with a hole where the face plate had been. Mose’s dive helmet. She fished again and found the lead sole of one of the weighted shoes, and a piece of copper shaped like half an ox yoke that she recognized as the corselet to the dive suit. Ida picked up the helmet and rubbed at the black until a gleam of copper showed. Henry pushed aside a few other bits of black. “Compressor.” Ida bent to look and when she turned around Oliver was halfway into the pile.
“Oliver! Get out of there!”
Henry, at least, heard her. He waded into the pile, gripped Oliver by the back of the coat and hoisted him free.
They resurrected a blackened ship’s lantern; a dented coffeepot; the ship’s bell; and an odd, large, flat-bottomed copper kettle lined with some kind of gray matter. Henry scraped at the gray. “Tin? Zinc?”
“Why would someone line a copper kettle with tin or zinc?”
Henry didn’t answer.
Before they finished they’d found three more identical kettles and piled them together on one side of the floor. Henry picked them up one by one and turned them over, brow knitted, as Ida looked on.
“What are they?”
“I can’t figure it. Copper would heat better than zinc or tin. It’s more durable. And then this odd hole just below the lip.”
“And four of them.”
They stood side by side and studied the kettles, Oliver anchored between them by Henry’s hand on his shoulder.
Ida gave up first. She bent down to Oliver and attempted to erase some of the black by brushing it with her fingers, but it only smeared. “Hattie will kill me.”
“Come,” Henry said. He took Oliver by the hand and led the way up the stairs to his apartment.
Ida stripped off Oliver’s outer garments and Henry stood him at the sink to scrub his hands and face with a gritty brown soap that Ida hoped never to encounter herself, while she took a wet cloth to the jacket and trousers. She could hear Oliver chattering away at the sink—something about a red ship with blue sails—interspersed with Henry’s responses: Indeed. Curious. You don’t say. By the time Oliver’s clothes had gone from black to gray, Oliver had gone from black to spotless.
“All right,” Henry declared. “Safe to take him back.”
Ida had planned to walk Oliver to the exchange alone, but Henry declared his own business with Chester Luce and fell in alongside. At the exchange Ida reminded Hattie of the bicycle lesson.
“Oh,” Hattie said, “I think not today.”
“Oliver can help. He says he has a bicycle.”
Hattie laughed. “That his father bought him.”
Oh, thought Ida. So not.
Ida continued on up the hill. Henry came with her. Ida didn’t remind him of his business with Chester Luce—it wasn’t up to her to keep his affairs straight—and besides, he’d launched into another topic of some interest.
“I wanted to tell you I’m going to Newport next week,” Henry said.
Ida, thinking of the way Henry had captured Oliver off the junk pile, how he’d stood guard over him at the sink as if he’d done it before, said, “Are your girls in Newport too?”
“Good Lord, I would hope not. They’re with my wife’s parents.” Henry paused. “Often, it seems.”
As Ida had nothing to say to that, they walked on in silence. The low winter light had dropped below the hill by the time they reached Ida’s house, and for no sensible reason other than to defy Ruth and Lem, Ida said, “Would you come in?”
Ida roused the fire and lit the lamps. She made roasted cheese and put it out with a leftover onion soup and the whiskey bottle, all of which seemed to please Henry. When he finished eating he stretched his legs to the fire and crossed his arms over his chest. Long before he spoke Ida knew he had something to say that would carry some weight.
“You told me you didn’t like Ezra much,” he said. “Even at the beginning?”
“Do you think I’d marry someone I didn’t like?” And there it was again—the tone. Was Ruth right? Had she no manners?
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “I don’t know how independent of each other the two things are—liking and loving. I know I wanted my wife more than anything on earth, but when I saw that portrait of yours at the Boston Art Guild—”
Ida swiveled toward Henry in surprise. “Of Mrs. McKinley?”
“I saw that woman’s face and couldn’t imagine it with either a laugh or a tear. Then I looked at Perry standing beside her, the same face, only younger, and I realized why the woman in the portrait looked so familiar. I’d never seen Perry with either a laugh or a tear. Or not an honest one, at least.”
“Don’t tell me that looking at my portrait made you decide to divorce her.”
Henry stood up, walked to the window, looked out at that darkness, walked back, looked down at Ida. “Perhaps I didn’t explain my situation clearly enough,” he said, his voice tight. “It was my wife who decided to divorce me.”
“And you who decided to go to Newport.”
“If you have a point to make, please do.”
Oh, she’d heard that before. From Ezra. Is there a point here? As a rule, when they reached the point in a conversation Ida walked away, understanding that they’d gone beyond any hope of useful communication.
But Ida did have a point to make. “You do understand whether or not you divorce is not my business?”
“Excuse me. I thought we knew each other well enough to share our dilemmas. I didn’t like my husband much. My wife and I are divorcing.” He moved toward the door. “Thank you for the lovely meal. I’m now two in your debt.”
“Henry.”
He turned.
“It only seemed to me you were testing your decision, seeking my opinion as to whether it was right. Which I can’t give. You do see that?”
He studied her. “Yes, I suppose. Of course.”
“But I must say, if you’re testing your decision, it seems to me that it would imply some doubt.”
Henry returned to the fire, dropped into the chair, and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You and Ezra. What was it like in the beginning?”
One clear, warm summer night, not long after they’d met at the wedding, Ida had opened the door of her empty brownstone to find Ezra Pease on the stoop. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, no tie, his coat slung over one shoulder; the light from the open door put a shine in his eyes and when he spoke his teeth gleamed.
“I’ve come to take you walking.”
Without going back inside, without a covering of any kind, Ida had pulled the door closed behind her, and they’d walked up the hill side by side. Ezra talked of the fine night, of the crime of wasting it indoors; he inquired of her health and spirits; were things getting better?
“Not better,” Ida answered. “Easier.”
“Tell me about your family.” Ezra’s voice was low and intimate, as if only he would care to know, and Ida told him, at much more length than she’d supposed possible: how she’d idolized both her brothers far beyond any hope of them living up to her construction; how her mother had been warm and enveloping but her father had been distant, forcing her to strive to gain a look or a word. That striving made those looks, those words, far more valuable in Ida’s eyes than her mother’s warmth; Ida said this for the first time to Ezra Pease, and said it with such pain she’d been unable to say anything else for a time. But they’d reached the top of the hill, and Ezra took her by the shoulders and turned her, pointing, his head so close to hers she could feel his breath: the Big and Little Dipper. The Seven Sisters. The Summer Triangle. Ida pretended she hadn’t known perfectly well where they were, and on the way down she’d recovered herself enough to ask of his family. The situation was similar but vastly different: father, mother, and three sisters all dead, but slowly, one at a time, over a span of twenty years.
“I have one aunt left,” he said. “And a cousin. I’d like to take you to meet them, to see my farm.” His farm.
Ida told Henry some, but not all of this. Her intention had been to show that her decision to marry Ezra had not been irrational, that she could reasonably have done so with the expectation of perfect happiness. But what had seemed so dazzling on that night, so star-filled above and below, now seemed contrived, even manipulative, in the retelling. Granted she was younger and freshly bruised, but why hadn’t she seen then what she saw now? For one, the way Ezra had assumed Ida’s willingness to go out walking alone. For another, the ways he found to put his hands on her in a context she would be unable—or at least unlikely—to oppose.
But when Ida finished telling Henry her tale he said only, “Yes.”
“At the beginning, I forgave Ezra everything,” Ida said. “At the end, nothing. Perhaps I’m in part to blame.”
Henry leaned over, gripped the arm of Ida’s chair. “There are some things that are unforgivable,” he said. “There are some people . . . There are times when one must stop striving to forgive or understand or explain and simply move on. To open that door and step through it.” He looked down at his hand, still gripping the arm of Ida’s chair, as if unsure as to how it got there. He drew it away; stood up. “I must go,” he said.
He opened Ida’s door and stepped through it. After he’d gone some way down the track his voice wafted back up the hill through the night: Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter . . .
Again, Ida had neglected to tell Henry about the gold. By now, it seemed, she should be wondering why that was.