For the first time in years, the summer days hold more hours than I know what to do with. I order wallpaper from a catalog in the Fales store and enlist Mother’s help in transforming the rooms downstairs. (If this is to be my home, let it at least be papered with small pink flowers on a field of white.) Mother persuades me to join groups I’ve previously disdained—the Friendly Club, the Helpful Women’s Club, the South Cushing Baptist Church sewing circle, with their ice cream socials and apron sales and weekly meetings. I borrow books from the library that Walton didn’t recommend. (Ethan Frome in particular, with its bleak New England winters, its agonizing compromises and tragic mistakes, keeps me up at night.) I take sewing orders for dresses and nightgowns and slips from ladies in town. I even agree to go to the Grange Hall on a Friday night with Ramona and Eloise and my brothers, though when I hear the cheerful piano and fiddle music wafting through the trees as we get closer—“Tiger Rag” and “Lady of the Lake”—I want to vanish into the woods.
As soon as we arrive, everyone disperses. “You poor dear!” Gertrude Gibbons yelps from across the room when she spots me. She rushes over and grabs my hand. “We were all so sorry to hear.”
“I’m fine, Gertrude,” I say, attempting to fend her off.
“Oh, I know you have to say that,” she stage whispers. “You are so brave, Christina.”
“I’m not.”
She squeezes my hand. “You are, you are! After all you’ve been through. I would crawl into a hole.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I would! I would just collapse. You are so . . .” She sticks her lip out in a pretend pout. “You always make the best of things. I admire that so much.”
And just like that, I’ve had enough. I close my eyes, take a breath, open them. “Well, see, now, I admire you.”
She puts a hand on her chest. “Really?”
“Yes. I think it would be hard to have such a slender sister, when you try so desperately to watch your weight. That doesn’t seem fair at all.”
She stands erect. Pulls her stomach in. Bites her lip. “I hardly think—”
“It must be very difficult.” Reaching out, I pat her shoulder. “Everybody says so.”
I know I’m being unkind, but I can’t help myself. And I don’t regret it when I see the hurt look on her face. My heart is shattered, and all that’s left are jagged shards.
MOTHER HAS BEGUN spending entire days in her bedroom with the shades drawn. Dr. Heald comes and goes, trying to figure out what is wrong. I hover in the shadows out of his way. “It appears that she has a progressive kidney disease and possibly a heart condition,” he tells us finally. “She needs to rest. When she feels up to it, she can venture out into the sunshine.”
She has good days and bad. On bad days, she doesn’t come out of her room. (When she calls for tea, I make my way up the stairs slowly, rattling the teacup in its saucer, splashing the hot liquid on my hand.) On good days, she appears after I’ve finished washing the breakfast dishes and sits with me in the kitchen. Now and then, when she’s feeling particularly well, we’ll take a picnic to Little Island, timing our walks to the ebb of the tide. We are quite a pair: a sickly woman short of breath and a lame girl lurching alongside.
Mother keeps Mamey’s black bible, worn and faded from years of travel, on the table beside her bed, and often thumbs through its gossamer pages. Now and then she murmurs the words aloud she knows by heart: We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope . . . For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison . . .
One morning I come to the barn to bring Papa a jug of water and find him slumped against the mule in its stall, a strange grimace on his face. Startled, I drop the cup and stumble forward.
“Help me, Christina,” he gasps, reaching out a hand. “I can’t get up.” His muscles constrict and spasm; his legs are so painful, he says, that he can barely move them. When I finally get him into the house, he lies on the floor of the kitchen and kneads his calves, trying to dull the pain.
Al goes to fetch Dr. Heald. After examining Papa, he announces that it must be arthritis, and there’s not much he can do.
With Mother in and out of bed and Papa increasingly infirm, the duties of the household fall even more heavily on my brothers and me. We have no choice, or the whole farm will slide into entropy—animals unfed, the cows needing milking, tasks doubled for the next day. To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.
AS SUMMER TURNS to fall, envelopes with two-cent stamps postmarked Boston begin to arrive for me at the post office again. Ramona’s “small family wedding,” she reports, has grown, predictably, into a more lavish affair. Her dress will be modern, despite her mother’s objections—a white satin V-neck with a skirt just below the knee, a wide satin belt, and a bridal cap veil (not, God forbid, her grandmother’s, with its crumbling yellowed lace). “If suffragettes can picket the White House, I can express my emancipation from long skirts and old veils,” Ramona declares. She will carry a bouquet of irises like the bride on the cover of Hearst’s magazine.
The invitation—on thick cream card stock, hand-painted with pastel flowers—arrives in an oversized cream envelope. I stand in the road and read the words etched in florid black script:
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Carle
Respectfully request the honor of your presence
At the marriage ceremony of their daughter
Ramona Jane
And Harland Woodbury . . .
Equally respectfully, on notebook paper, I decline to attend. My brothers are busy with the harvest and I must prepare for the holidays, but we all send our best wishes to the happy couple. (And later a silverplate tea service marked down on sale at a home goods shop in Thomaston.)
After the wedding, held in early November, I receive a honeymoon postcard postmarked Newport—“Such magnificent houses! All the ladies here wear furs”—and, a few weeks later, a note describing the sunny apartment in a new brick building that the newlyweds are renting in Boston. “You must come and visit in early spring. I know Al will be busy with the planting, so bring dear Sam,” Ramona writes. “He needs an adventure, and so do you. It’s neither haying nor holiday season, so no excuses. A few weeks only! Nothing will be disrupted.”
The idea of traveling to Boston under such vastly different circumstances than the one I envisioned sends me to bed with a headache for the afternoon.
“YOU KNOW WE can’t possibly go,” I tell Sam when he confronts me with the letter, which I foolishly left open on the dining room table.
“Why not?”
“The distance . . . my infirmity—”
“Nonsense,” Sam says. “I’ve never been anywhere. Nor have you. We’re going.”
Looking at tall, handsome Sam, with his strong jaw and aquiline nose and piercing gray eyes, I think of all those seafaring Samuels he was named after, setting off to explore the world. Sam is twenty years old. Ramona is right—he needs an adventure. “You go,” I urge him.
“Not without you.”
“But—Al can’t manage the farm on his own.”
“He’s not on his own. Fred is here. And Papa will help.”
I give him a skeptical look. Papa hasn’t been much help for a while now.
“Al will be fine. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
So it is that early on a March morning in 1918, despite my trepidation, Al drives us through the fog to Thomaston, where Sam and I will catch a train bound for North Union Station in Boston. The staircases and ticket lines, narrow hallways and train platforms are a bewildering obstacle course for both of us, made even more difficult by my tight new shoes. Sam carries both suitcases and an overcoat and still manages to keep a firm arm under mine, steadying me as we slowly make our way toward the gate. When we finally get to our railway car, we collapse onto the red leather seats.
A few minutes after we’ve left the station, Sam asks, “Got anything to eat?”
I had packed a few dry biscuits in my bag, but when I pull them out, they crumble in my hand. Just as I’m thinking we might have to wait until Boston, the conductor, a red-faced man with a bristly mustache, happens along to collect our tickets. Sam fumbles through his jacket for them. “Let me guess,” the conductor says. “First time on a train?”
I nod.
“Thought so.” He leans over the seat. “Lavatories are in the next car . . .” He points a meaty finger toward the right. “And the dining room is four cars down. You can get a hot meal or a cup of tea. Or whiskey, if you prefer,” he says, chuckling. His breath is briny, like lobster.
“Thank you,” I say. But after he moves along, I tell Sam, “I don’t think we should. We need to budget.” We’ve brought $80 for the entire visit; the round-trip fare has already eaten up $5.58 each. But I’m also reluctant to make a spectacle of myself, jerking back and forth.
“What we need to do is eat,” Sam says.
“You go and bring me something small.”
Sam knows what I’m thinking. Four long cars. He stands with a flourish and holds out his arm. I take a deep breath and rise to my feet. But now there’s another question: Do we take our things with us so they won’t be stolen, or do we leave them here? An elderly woman with a face like a cellar apple leans forward in her seat across the aisle. “Don’t worry, dears, I’ll watch your bags.”
The swaying of the train actually disguises my infirmity. Accustomed to having to work to keep my balance, I adjust to it more quickly than Sam, who weaves from side to side like a drunkard. In the dining car, we eat ham sandwiches and drink tea with milk and sugar, gazing out at the rushing dark. For years I’ve dreamed of this moment—or rather, a moment like this. How different it is from my imaginings! My ankles are cold, my feet pinched in these new shoes, the air sour with tobacco smoke and body odor, the bread stale, the tea weak and bitter.
And yet—here I am, going somewhere new. How shockingly easy it was to pick up and go, to buy a ticket and board a train and head off into the unknown.
Portland, Portsmouth, Newburyport. We slow into stations one after another that never have meant more to me than words on a map. When we arrive in Salem, I think about our ancestor who lived here. I imagine Bridget Bishop standing on the scaffold, trying desperately to use the sentence against her to her own advantage. If you truly believe I’m a witch, she must have thought, then you must also believe I have the power to harm you. I’ve always assumed that John Hathorne trumped up those charges against rebels and misfits as a way of enforcing social codes. But now I wonder: What if he really did believe those women were capable of ensnaring his soul?
When we pull into South Station, it’s dark and cold and we must take three different trains to get to the Carles’—one of them elevated, which requires dragging our bags up and down stairs. With Sam’s arm under mine I concentrate on my steps, one foot up, the next one down. When I dreamed of a life with Walton, I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to navigate city living. Everything comes back to this body, this faulty carapace. How I wish I could crack it open and leave it behind.