Ida had long grown sick of mutton by the time Henry Barstow returned. She’d walked into town, heading for Bradley’s harness shop to get a halter repaired, but was diverted by a group gathered on the shoreline. A crisp breeze chilled her west-facing nose but the sun in the east warmed the back of her neck; Ida decided to linger. Numerous vessels still lay scattered along the shore but fewer than at first; even now a crew was at work digging out around a schooner, no doubt in hope of her lifting with the next good tide. Another group stood with their eyes fixed on the middle of the harbor where a salvage lighter sat parked. Ida picked out Chester Luce at the fringe of the group and walked up. She pointed to the lighter.
“They’re refloating the Addie Todd,” Luce said. “They salvaged the cargo of lumber, and the divers are down there patching the hull now. They’ll start pumping her out soon.” He didn’t seem to have much more to say to Ida, and as no one else did either, she walked on to the harness shop and left the halter, too distracted to remember to ask when it might be done. She was thinking instead of the windfall that would have come to Ezra and Mose if they’d stayed put in Vineyard Haven. After they bought the Cormorant they’d shelled out three hundred and fifty dollars for pump, compressor, pipes, and a diving suit for Mose, but not three days later they’d raised a large coasting vessel and made back the whole sum plus a fifty-dollar profit. Soon after that they’d salvaged a cargo of tar and been paid 60 percent of its value. A bronze bell got them twenty-five dollars, an anchor and chain another hundred. In the slow times Mose had worked as diver-for-hire at five dollars a day and added that to the coffers, and those were just the sums Ida had heard about. How could all of that have been lost at cards? Ida considered the long evenings she’d spent alone. Easy enough.
Ida headed home by the main road. As she passed the salvage office she could hear singing, muffled through door and walls but clearly Henry. She paused outside until she’d identified the tune:
Well, I had an old hen and she had a wooden leg,
Just the best old hen that ever laid an egg,
She laid more eggs than any hen on the farm,
But another little drink wouldn’t do her any harm . . .
“Turkey in the Straw.” Ida smiled; she pushed open the door. Henry had managed to get the stove to stop smoking and had dried out what needed drying, returning it to the shelves, but the junk still sat in a pile although it looked to be a neater pile. Beyond the pile, a bicycle leaned against the wall.
A bicycle?
Henry followed Ida’s gaze. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
“I . . . yes.”
“Do you ride?”
“Yes . . . no . . . that is . . . I want—” She wanted to ride a bicycle. She was suddenly, desperately determined to learn to ride a bicycle. Once Ida had been on the dock when a group of women with bicycles had wheeled off the boat and spun down the road; they were dressed alike in flat straw hats, close-fitting jackets with leg-o-mutton-sleeves, skirts that fell just above the ankle, and gaiters. She’d gazed after them until they’d turned the corner, not one faltering or falling, and she could still summon the image of them sweeping away from her—upright, confident, smiling. Free.
Ida pulled her eyes from the gleaming machine and whirled on Henry Barstow. “I want to learn to do it.”
Barstow gave Ida a thoughtful look. He pulled the bicycle out from the wall and pointed out its features: leather seat, curved handlebars, and the latest innovation—coaster brakes. “You see?” He used his hand to roll the pedals forward—go—and backward—brake. He leaned the bicycle back again the wall, went to the stove and poured out a coffee that came thick and black from a pot, as if it had been sitting on the stove for days. He offered it to Ida. He began to talk, more than Ida had heard him talk yet—of his carriage shop in New Bedford, of how the automobile would soon put a crimp in his business, of how he’d begun to add bicycles to his inventory, of which bicycles were best, of the various features of each. Some of it Ida bothered to follow and some of it she didn’t, but she liked the sound of his voice—that deep, male richness that she’d come to miss. Or perhaps it wasn’t the maleness that she liked—it wasn’t often of late that she’d enjoyed the sound of Ezra’s voice—but the calmness in it. It told Ida she could relax and be herself in its presence. But of course there was also the heat of the stove and the coffee burning seductively down her throat . . .
Henry switched to talk of their mutual affairs. He still needed to inventory the warehouse but he’d received the valuation on the property itself; he began to sift through the papers on the desk looking for it, the golden hairs on the backs of his hands glinting in the light, but as Ida watched him deftly peel back sheet after sheet she remembered another encounter she’d once had with Henry Barstow.
Ida and Ezra had walked into town for a rare dinner out at the Bayside and it had been a lovely evening, one of those times when Ezra had seemed like the Ezra of their courtship. He’d reached across the table to feed her an oyster, made a fuss of wiping her lips with his napkin, even rested his hand over hers, right out in the open, right on the tabletop. She remembered looking down at their joined hands on the starched white cloth and thinking that maybe it would be all right.
And then. Tracking backward, Ida could now see that her marriage hadn’t gone wrong in one great avalanche—it had been more like the steady drip of snowmelt off a spring roof. That evening, that particular drip, had as its catalyst Tully Mayhew, just back from California and hailing Ezra through the restaurant window; with him were Mose and Henry Barstow. Ezra leaped up, ran into the street, slapped and laughed with Tully, and then returned to the table. “Tully Mayhew’s back!” he told Ida, as if this was news she’d been waiting on for weeks. “They’re headed for Duffy’s. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Mind what?”
“My going to Duffy’s, Ida,” Ezra said, as if speaking to a child. “We’ve finished dinner.” Ezra peeled off bills and laid them on the table. He lifted his eyes and caught Ida’s look. “What is it? The city girl wants me to walk her home? All right, let’s get along.”
“Go,” Ida said. She pulled another bill out of Ezra’s hand. “I’m going to have coffee. And dessert.”
“You’ve got coffee and pie at the house.”
“Yes, I do, but right now I’m in the mood for someone else’s coffee. And cake.”
Ida turned to signal the waitress and by the time she’d turned again, Ezra had left.
Ida ordered a piece of yellow cake with butter frosting and a cup of coffee and another cup after that. She watched the few other diners—a table of six men, strangers to Ida, likely off one of the ships in the harbor, and a husband and wife she recognized who lived out along the county road but whose names, if she’d ever known them, had long escaped her. She gazed at the lanterns on the anchored boats, fighting the jangle of the coffee, attempting to stay unruffled. Calm. Ezra was right—they had finished dinner, and they would never stay to order dessert when Ida had an apple pie in the pie cupboard at home; neither did it made sense for Ezra to walk up the hill only to walk back down again a minute later. Even so, it rankled, a special night turned into a contentious one.
Ida must have been sitting there longer than she’d thought because Henry Barstow passed the window, looked in, saw her still sitting there, and stopped dead. He came in.
“I’m surprised to see you here. Ezra said you’d gone home. Is everything all right?”
“I’ve been enjoying the view.”
“Ah.” He turned to look out with her.
“You weren’t long at Duffy’s,” Ida said.
“I try to exit with my dignity intact.” He smiled. “And my pocketbook.”
“Ah. Ezra never minds leaving those things behind.”
“Or his wife?” Barstow looked away, looked back. “I’m sorry. It’s not my place to—”
“He wanted to walk me home. I told him I wished to stay on a bit, watch the lights come up on the ships. But now I’m ready to go.” Ida pushed back her chair and stood at the exact minute Barstow reached to help and Ida knocked into his arm, scattering some papers he’d been carrying. She leaned over to help collect the pages but by the time she’d gotten there he’d already deftly sorted them into a neat sheaf.
He straightened. “May I walk you home?”
The little dance with the papers had left them standing so close Ida imagined she could feel the heat from the lantern light reflected in his eyes. Extraordinary, he’d said in Boston, referring to her painting of Mrs. McKinley. On a few occasions, usually late and in the dark, Ida had wondered what he’d found so extraordinary about that work. Now she imagined them discussing it as they climbed the hill side by side, one of those deft hands under her elbow as they walked . . .
“No,” Ida said. “No thank you.”
“Please. I’m not just playing the gentleman. I’ve been hoping for a chance to talk to you about commissioning a painting.”
Ida felt her shoulders ease. A commission. No one could fault her for accepting a walk and a talk over a commission. And besides, who was there to fault her—the six strangers off the ships? The couple from out along the county road had long gone. Ida and Barstow set off down the street, side by side, step synced to step.
Ida had already learned that October on the Vineyard was never one thing—the sun could bake them one day and the wind could frost the grass the next. It was true the sun had already sunk, leaving nothing behind but a diffuse gold band at the very rim of the earth that flickered and dimmed with each step they took, but the wind was still soft and halfhearted, tipping the occasional leaf and then retreating to the treetops. Neither spoke, but neither seemed to mind; when Ida slowed to look at an early star, Henry stopped and looked with her. Without the forward motion Ida grew aware again of how close together they stood; she resumed walking at a quicker pace.
“You wanted to speak to me about a commission,” she said.
Henry didn’t speak for so long, she began to think she’d misunderstood him at the restaurant. “Mose and I grew up on a farm in Chilmark,” he said at last. “We had a good time on that farm when we were boys. But once we began to grow into ourselves we couldn’t wait to get out, get off, get on that boat. And before I managed to book a return trip, my father died.” Barstow cleared his throat. “Before he died, a photographer came to the farm and took a picture of my father working in the orchard. The photograph is fading out and there are other folks in it I don’t care about. I wonder—could you paint my father in his orchard?”
“I do studio portraits,” Ida said. “I don’t know about an orchard.”
“It’s mostly my father I want. Will you look at the photograph, at least?”
“Of course.”
They’d reached the track. The growing dark had brought out more stars but concealed the ground—not that the second part mattered since Ida was looking up at the stars anyway—but of course she would trip, and there it was, the hand under her elbow, light but firm, warm even through her sleeve.
“Whoa! Mind your feet.”
Ida fixed her eyes on the ground and picked up her pace once more, which separated elbow from hand. “Do you miss the Vineyard?” she asked.
“On nights like this,” Barstow said. He looked up at the sky as if to demonstrate the parts he missed and he tripped, but with no steadying hand at his elbow he went all the way down, measuring his whole long length in the dirt.
Ida bent over him. “Are you hurt?”
Henry didn’t answer, mostly, it would appear, because he was laughing. Laughing. If that had been Ezra he’d have bolted upright cursing the invisible root that had tripped him, the loose boot heel the cobbler hadn’t fixed properly, or Ida for whatever she’d said that had distracted him from minding his step or for tripping him up in the first place or just for bearing witness.
But when Henry stopped laughing and still didn’t move, Ida grew concerned. “Do you need help?”
“All kinds, no doubt, but I believe I see the Big Dipper emerging. God’s breath! Was that a shooting star or am I suffering from concussion? But as the odds are slim that you’re going to join me down here in the dirt I’d best get up.” He jackknifed upright, reclaimed her arm, pulled it through his, and locked it there with the opposite hand. “Now if I fall you go with me,” he said.
Ida laughed, and she laughed again, all alone, after he’d left her at her door, thinking of that ridiculously long shape lying in the dirt and grinning up at the stars, regretting not lying down in the dirt with him.
Now, at the salvage office, watching Henry Barstow’s hands a second time, remembering that other night and the feel of those hands, Ida flushed and stood up.
Henry stopped shuffling his papers. “Must you go? I’d hoped to repay you for that dinner.”
“No,” Ida said. “No thank you.”
She was lonely, that was all it was. But how dangerous, this loneliness! The last time she’d felt this lonely she’d run off and married a sheep farmer, and not a month ago she’d said to him, with as much feeling as she’d ever said anything to anyone: Go. Stay there forever. Now he was gone forever. Ida had seldom been lonely when Ezra was gone for a week at a time, the peace overriding any other emotion, but now the permanence of this new state left her feeling hollow, unstable, vulnerable, as if she’d never weathered a storm or chased off a fox or corralled an ornery sheep. She lay in bed remembering how Ezra used to rest his hand on her hip as they slept, remembering the hot weight of that hand and how content, how anchored she’d felt lying under it. She remembered how he’d smelled of what he’d eaten and drunk and worn and done and smoked, the smell of his life and parts of hers. She missed that smell. Certainly if she could miss a man’s smell, she must have loved him once? Must have been able to forgive him once? But to deceive her about a late night at Duffy’s was one thing; to deceive her about the farm, to deceive her with Ruth . . .
Ida got up and went downstairs, as restless as a ewe about to lamb. What had Lem said? Ezra had signed over the deed to Ruth, yes, but he’d planned to buy it back. With Ida’s money, no doubt. So why hadn’t he? On their marriage, Ezra had been disgusted to find the Beacon Hill house heavily mortgaged; perhaps its sale and Ida’s family money hadn’t been enough for the farm and the boat and the business on Main Street, and he’d chosen to leave her homeless in the event of his death versus sacrificing his dream. In fairness, Ezra hadn’t chosen to die on the Portland, hadn’t chosen to leave Ida dependent on Ruth for her shelter, and yet Ida had to wonder now if she’d ever been anything but money to her husband. She thought back to the day they’d met, to Ezra’s eyes fixing on hers from all the way across the room, and again wondered—had they fixed on her heart or on her locket?
Ida circled to the desk, sat down, and rolled back the lid. She began to paw through the cubbyholes, looking for the only letters Ezra had ever written her, composed during that brief spell after their meeting when she was in Boston and he had returned to the island. There weren’t many letters, the meager number exhibiting how precipitous the courtship had been, the contents exhibiting that she’d been an easy enough mark. I wish you were here, he wrote in one. I see your eyes whenever I close mine, he wrote in another. Come, he wrote finally, as if he were commanding Bett, and she’d come, left home and career and what few friends she’d managed to keep after sinking into the solitude of her grief.
Ida combed through the rest of the papers in the desk: the farm book; a collection of business cards; the papers for the ram; some marine outfitter’s catalogs; bills and receipts; a sheet of letter paper, blank except for a Dear Sirs written across the top in Ezra’s hand before, presumably, he’d been interrupted. This was why she felt suspended, she realized; Ezra’s old world was still here, still intact, still waiting for him to return and finish his letter. What Ida needed was a good clear-out, a nice, deep line in the sand marking where she would leave the past and move into the future, whatever her future was.
Ida stuffed the business cards back in their cubbyhole in case she might find need of them. She saved the papers on the ram, the farm book, and the bills and receipts, but she took the letters and the catalogs and threw them on the floor next to the stove to use when lighting the next fire. She climbed the stairs and approached the closet again, ready now to face it. When her father and brothers died she’d given their clothes to a neighbor; when her mother died she’d kept her clothes and jewelry for herself, even the things that didn’t fit, even those she’d ruined with failed alterations. She wanted nothing of Ezra’s; she would ask Lem if he wanted anything, and if he didn’t, she’d take them to the Seamen’s Bethel to be donated to the shipwrecked sailors.
Ida opened the trunk that still sat in the middle of the room and spread her town clothes out on the bed. She began to fill it with Ezra’s clothing, shoes first, soles facing, as her mother had taught her, but when she got to the oiled jacket and wool sweater she rethought her decision to keep nothing—she’d already put those items to good use and might do so again. She folded the sweater on the shelf and hung the jacket back on its peg along with the best of her town clothes; she would spend her free time cleaning and mending them, getting them ready for Boston. She attempted to shove the trunk back into the closet until she could engage Lem and his wagon, but the trunk was heavier now that it was full of Ezra’s things, and she shoved it so hard it slammed into the rear wall, popping loose a piece of paneling. Ida pulled off her shoe, intending to bang the panel back into place, but as she bent low she saw that a piece of newspaper had been stuffed in behind the paneling. Ida lifted it out and felt something heavy inside. Lumpy. She unfolded it and a half dozen pebbles rolled out into her hand—rough, heavy, glittering. Too heavy. Too glittering. Too . . . gold.