1942-1943

As the war heats up we see transport ships far out at sea. Soldiers sent down from Belfast roam our property in green jeeps, patrolling the coastline, scanning the horizon with binoculars.

Al is amused. “What do they think is going to happen here?”

When one of the soldiers knocks on the door and asks if I’m aware of any “suspicious activity,” I ask him what on earth he means.

“Reports of enemy ships in the area,” he says darkly. “The Cushing waterfront has been declared unsafe.”

I think of the villainous pirates in Treasure Island and their telltale black flag with skull and crossbones. Our enemy—if one is lurking around—probably doesn’t announce itself so plainly. “Well, I’ve seen a lot of activity out there lately. More than usual. But I wouldn’t know if it’s friend or foe.”

“Just keep your eyes open, ma’am.”

Soon enough Cushing is subjected to intermittent blackouts and rationing. “This is worse than the Depression,” Fred’s wife, Lora, exclaims. “There’s barely enough gasoline to do my errands.”

“Cottage cheese is a sorry substitute for ground beef. I can’t for the life of me get Sam to eat it,” says my other sister-in-law, Mary.

None of it affects Al and me much. A poster on the wall in the post office instructs citizens to “Use it up—wear it out—make it do!” But that’s the way we’ve always lived. We’ve never had electricity, so blackouts are nothing new. (They happen every night when we extinguish the oil lamps.) And though we’ve come to rely on the Fales store for milk and flour and butter, most of what we eat comes from the fields and the orchard and the chicken coops. We still store root vegetables and apples in the cellar and perishables in an icebox under the floorboards in the pantry. Al does his butchering. I boil and crank the laundry as I’ve always done and hang it in the wind to dry.

It’s a cool September day when my nephew John, the oldest son of Sam and Mary, pulls up a chair in my kitchen. A lanky, mild-mannered boy with a lopsided grin, John has been my favorite nephew since he was born in this house twenty years ago.

“I have something to tell you, Aunt Christina.” He clasps my hand. “I hitched a ride to Portland yesterday and enlisted in the navy.”

“Oh.” I feel stricken. “Do you have to? Aren’t you needed on the farm?”

“I knew I’d be called up sooner or later. If I’d waited any longer, I’d’ve been drafted by the army into the infantry. I’d rather do it on my own terms.”

“What do your parents have to say about it?”

“They knew it was only a matter of time.”

I pause for a moment, absorbing this. “When do you leave?”

“In a week.”

“A week!”

He squeezes my hand. “Once you sign on the dotted line, Aunt Christina, you’re as good as gone.”

For the first time, the war feels starkly real. I put my other hand over his. “Promise you’ll write.”

“You know I will.”

True to his word, every ten days or so a postcard or a pale blue onionskin letter from John arrives at the post office in Cushing. After six long weeks of basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, he is assigned to the USS Nelson, a destroyer that escorts aircraft carriers and patrols for enemy ships and submarines. After that the postmarks become larger and more colorful: Hawaii, Casablanca, Trinidad, Dakar, France . . .

Our seafaring ancestors! Mamey would be pleased.

Sam and Mary erect a flagpole in their yard and hang a crisp new American flag for all to see. They are proud of John for serving his country. Mary coordinates scrap-iron drives to collect copper and brass for use in artillery shells and organizes get-togethers with other wives and mothers of servicemen to knit socks and scarves to send to the troops. “Our boy will come back a man,” Sam says.

I join Lora’s knitting circle and go around the house and barn gathering bits and pieces of metal to send to the war effort. But with John overseas, I sleep fitfully. All I want is for him to come home.

I READ ONCE that the act of observing changes the nature of what is observed. This is certainly true for Al and me. We are more attuned to the beauty of this old house, with its familiar corners, when Andy is here. More appreciative of the view down the yellow fields to the water, constant and yet ever changing, the black crows on the barn roof, the hawk circling overhead. A grain bag, a dented pail, a rope hanging from a rafter: these ordinary objects and implements are transformed by Andy’s brush into something timeless and otherworldly.

Sitting at the kitchen window early one morning, I notice that the sweet peas I planted years ago have flourished beyond all reason in their sunny spot beside the back door. Taking a paring knife from the utility drawer and a straw basket from the counter, I make my way to the vine and clip the fragrant blossoms, cream and pink and salmon, letting them tumble into the basket. In the pantry I take Mother’s tiny dust-covered crystal vases from a high shelf and wash them in the sink, then fill them with sprigs. I find spots for the vases all over the ground floor: on the kitchen counter, the mantel in the Shell Room, a windowsill in the dining room, even in the four-hole privy in the shed. I set the last vase at the foot of the stairs for Andy to take upstairs.

When he shows up several hours later, I hold my breath as he steps into the hall.

“What’s this?” he exclaims. “How glorious!” As he trudges up the stairs, he calls, “It’s going to be a good day, Christina, a very good day indeed.”

ONE HOT AFTERNOON I hear Andy pad down the stairs and out the front door. From the window in the kitchen I watch him pacing around barefoot in the grass. Hands on hips, he stares out at the sea. Then he walks slowly back to the house and materializes in the kitchen.

“I just can’t see it,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck.

“See what?”

He sits heavily on a stool.

“Lemonade?” I offer.

“Sure.”

I rise from my chair and grope along the wall to the narrow pantry, using the table, Andy’s rocker, and the wall for balance. Normally I’d feel self-conscious, but Andy is so lost in thought he doesn’t even notice.

Betsy—seven months pregnant and grumpy in the heat—left a pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade on the counter before returning home for a nap. When I lift the glass pitcher with both hands, it wobbles and I splash the liquid all over my arm. Annoyed at myself, I dab at it with a damp dishrag before carefully carrying the glass to Andy.

“Thanks.” Absentmindedly he licks the side of his hand where it’s sticky from the glass. As I settle back into my chair, he says, “You know, I spend entire days up there just . . . dreaming. It feels like so much wasted time. But I can’t seem to do it any other way.” He takes a long swig of lemonade and sets the empty glass on the floor. “Christ, I don’t know.”

I’m no artist, but I think I understand what he means. “Some things take the time they take. You can’t make the hens lay before they’re ready.” He nods, and I feel emboldened. “Sometimes I want the bread to rise quicker, but if I try to rush it, I ruin it.”

Breaking into a grin, he says, “That’s true.”

I feel a small glow in the pit of my stomach.

“You have an artist’s soul, Christina.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“We have more in common than you think,” he says.

Later I reflect on the things we have in common and the things we don’t. Our stubbornness and our infirmities. Our circumscribed childhoods. His father kept him out of school; we’re alike in that way. But N. C. trained him to be a painter and Papa trained me to take care of the house, and there’s a world of difference in that.

SOME OF ANDY’S sketches are hurried outlines, a map of the painting to come—a hint of a figure, grasses growing this way and that, geometric slashes of house and barn. Others are precisely shaded and detailed—every strand of hair and fold of fabric, the wood grain on the pantry door. His watercolors are inky greens and browns, the sky merely the white of the paper. Al in his flat-visored cap with his pipe, raking blueberries in the field, sitting on the front doorstep, gathering hay; the fine figure of our dun-colored mare, Tessie, in profile. Andy sketches the scarred wooden table, the white teapot, egg scales, grain bags in the barn, seed corn hanging to dry in a third-floor bedroom. On his canvases these objects look the same, but different. They have a burnished glow.

Andy’s father paints in oil, he tells me. But he prefers egg tempera, he says, the method of European masters like Giotto and Botticelli in the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. It dries quickly, leaving a muted effect. I watch as he cracks an egg, separates the yolk from the white, and rolls the plump sac gently between his hands to remove the albumen. He pokes the yolk with the tip of a knife, pours the orange liquid into a cup of distilled water, stirs it around with his finger. Adds a chalky powdered pigment to make a paste.

After dipping a small brush into the tempera, he presses out the wetness and color with his fingers and splays the tip to make dry spiky strokes. He layers it over a pale wash of color or pencil and ink on a Masonite fiberboard coated with gesso, a smooth mix of rabbit-skin glue and chalk. Though he works fast, the brushstrokes are painstaking and meticulous, each one distinct. Cross-hatched grass, a dense, dark row of plantings. When wet, the colors are as red as Indian paintbrush, russet as clay, blue as the bay on a summer afternoon, green as a holly leaf. These bright wet colors fade as they dry, leaving a ghostly glow. “Intensity—painting emotions into objects—is the only thing I care about,” he says.

Over time Andy’s paintings become starker, drained of color, austere. Mostly white and brown and gray and black. “Damn it to hell,” Andy murmurs, cocking his head to look at a newly finished watercolor: Al’s shadowy figure walking down the rows in his visored cap, the white house and gray barn stark on the horizon. “This is better. Betsy was right.”

WHEN HE ISN’T upstairs painting, Andy hovers near me like a bee around honeycomb. He is fascinated with our habits and routines. How are the hens laying, how do you make a perfect loaf of bread without measuring, how do you keep the slugs from the dahlias? What kinds of trees does Al cut for firewood, what type of sail do lobstermen around here use on their boats? How do you collect the water in the cistern? Why are so many things in the house painted the same shade of blue? Why is a dory marooned in the rafters of the shed? Why is that long ladder propped against the house?

“We don’t have a telephone,” Al explains in his laconic way. “And the closest fire company is nine miles from here. If there’s a roof or chimney fire . . .”

“Got it,” Andy says.

These questions are easy to answer. But over time his inquiries become more personal. Why do Al and I live here alone, with all these empty rooms? What was it like when it was full of people, before most of the fields went to flower?

At first I’m guarded. “It just turned out that way,” I tell him. “Life was busier then.”

Andy isn’t satisfied with evasions. Why did it turn out that way? Did you or Al ever want to live somewhere, anywhere, else?

It’s hard to say what’s in my head. It’s been a long time since anyone cared to ask.

He insists. “I want to know.”

So little by little, I open up. I tell him about the trip to Rockland when I refused to see the doctor. The disappearing treasure in Mystery Tunnel. The witches, the sea captains, the ship stranded in ice . . .

What did you miss about going to school?

Why were you so scared of doctors?

He is as gentle as a dog, as curious as a cat.

Who are you, Christina Olson?

In the Shell Room one afternoon Andy finds Papa’s wooden box of keepsakes and opens the lid. He strokes the smooth tines of the whalebone comb. Picks up the tiny tin soldier and raises its arms with his forefinger. “Whose is this?”

“My father’s. This box is the only thing of his I kept after he died.”

“I used to collect toy soldiers,” he muses. “When I was a boy, I created a whole battlefield. I still have a row of them lined up on the windowsill in my studio in Pennsylvania.” He sets the soldier back in the box and runs a finger over the black lump of anthracite. “Why do you think he held on to this?”

“He liked rocks and minerals, he said.”

“This is anthracite, right?”

I nod.

“Coal’s glamorous cousin,” he says. “In the Civil War—did your father tell you this?—anthracite was used by Confederate blockade runners as fuel for their steamships to avoid giving themselves away. It burns clean. No smoke.”

“I’ve never heard that,” I say. But I think: How apt. Papa was never one to give himself away.

“They called them ghost ships. It’s a terrifying image, isn’t it? These ominous ships materializing out of nowhere.” He sets the anthracite back in the box and shuts the lid. “Did he ever go back to Sweden?”

“No. But I’m named after his mother. Anna Christina Olauson.”

“Did you know her?”

I shake my head. “It’s strange, don’t you think—to name your child after a living person you’ve chosen never to see again?”

“Not so strange,” he says. “There’s this great line from The House of the Seven Gables: ‘The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease.’ Your father must have felt he had to forge his own path, even if it meant cutting ties to his family. It’s brave to resist the pull of the familiar. To be selfish about your own needs. I wrestle with that every day.”

SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER Andy and Betsy return to Chadds Ford for the winter, I get a letter from Betsy. In September she gave birth to a sickly child, Nicholas, who needed a lot of special care but seems to be all right. In November Andy was drafted into the army. When he reported for his physical they took one look at his twisted right leg and his flat feet and rejected him on the spot. “He truly feels he’s been given a reprieve and is determined to make the most of it,” she writes.

A reprieve of one sort, I think. But though I may not have a child of my own, I know all too well how the demands of family life can become consuming. I wonder if, as a father, now, Andy will feel even more torn between the pull of the familiar and the creative impulses that drive him.