Only traces of white remain on the sun-bleached, snow-battered clapboards and shingles of this old house. Inside, wood smoke, fuel oil, and tobacco have darkened the wallpaper. Sometimes it feels as if Al and I are living in a haunted house with the ghosts of our parents, our grandparents, all those sea captains and their wives and children. I still keep the door between the kitchen and the shed open for the witches.
Ghosts and witches, all around. The thought is oddly comforting.
Much of the time, these days, the house is quiet. I’ve come to think of silence as another kind of sound. After all, the world is never totally silent, even in the middle of the night. Beds creak, a wolf howls, wind stirs the trees, the sea roars and shushes. And of course there’s plenty to see. In springtime I watch the deer, noses to the wind, trailed by speckled fawns; in summer rabbits and raccoons; in autumn a bull moose loping across the field; a red fox vivid against December snow.
Hours accumulate like snow, recede like the tide. Al and I drift through our routines. Get up when we want to, go to bed when light drains from the sky. Nobody’s schedules to attend to other than our own. We hunker down in the fall and winter, slow our heartbeats to a hibernating rhythm, struggle to rouse ourselves in March. People from away arrive in cars laden with bags and boxes in June and July and head out in the opposite direction in August and September. One year melts into the next. Each season is like it was the year before, with minor variations. Our conversations often revolve around the weather: Will this summer be hotter than last; can we expect an early frost, how many inches of snow by December?
This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.
In the summer I’m usually up before sunrise, lighting the Glenwood range and making porridge. (I rarely sleep through the night on my pallet; my legs throb, even in my dreams.) I’ll scoop a cup for myself and eat it in the dark, listening to the sounds of the house, the gulls cawing outside. When Al comes into the kitchen, I’ll hand him a cup of porridge and he’ll take it to the counter and sprinkle sugar on it from Mother’s cut-glass bowl.
“Well, I suppose it’s milking time,” he says when he’s finished. He carries the cup to the sink in the pantry and dredges water from the pump.
“I can wash that,” I sometimes protest. “You’ve got chores.”
But he always rinses his cup, and my cup too. “It’s no trouble.”
When Al heads out to the barn, I sit in my old chair looking out the window toward the road to town in one direction and the St. George River, and beyond it the sea, in the other. The sun shimmers on the water and the wind carves patterns in the high grass. Around mid-morning Andy usually shows up, disappears upstairs, emerges for lunch, leaves in the late afternoon. With the door propped open, Topsy and the cats come and go as they please. Sometimes a friendly porcupine climbs up the steps, waddles across the kitchen, and disappears into the pantry. I might drift to sleep and wake to purring, which sounds to my sleep-clotted brain like a faraway motor. Lolly, seeing my eyes flicker, stretches toward my face, her paws digging into my shoulder. I reach under her rib cage, feeling through her warm skin the quick thrumming of her heart.
Later in the day I’ll weed and prune my flower garden, brilliant with color—poppies and pansies and an assortment of sweet peas, pale blue, peach, magenta. Red geraniums grow fat and healthy in the window in their Spry shortening cans and old blue-painted pots. I fill vases with the white lilacs that have grown beside the shed for a hundred years alongside Al’s favorite pink roses. The cats sprawl in the sun, blinking lazily. I can’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be.
But in the winter, when it’s so cold in the early morning that you can see your breath as you lie in bed, when getting to the barn requires a hoe to cut through the icy crust on top of the snow, when the wind slices branches off the trees and the sky is as dull as a stone, it’s hard to see why anyone would live here if they have a choice. Heating this old house is like heating a lobster trap. The three woodstoves must be fed constantly or we will freeze. It takes eleven cords of wood to keep the fires burning until spring. Darkness comes early without electricity. Before turning in, Al banks the stoves high with firewood to keep the embers glowing through the night. I heat bricks in the oven to wrap in towels and slide under the covers. Many nights we are in bed by eight o’clock, staring at the ceiling in separate rooms.
Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root. I think of those long-ago Hathorns, determined beyond all reason to leave the past behind—and we, their descendants, inheritors of their contrarian tenacity, sticking it out, one generation after the next, until every last one of us ends up in the graveyard at the bottom of the field.
THE POSTCARD, STAMPED Tokyo, features a scenic view of an arched bridge leading to a mansion with a curved roof. “Nijubashi: The Main Entrance to the Imperial Palace,” the caption says, in English, on the front, next to a string of Japanese characters. Though it’s not unlike the half-dozen postcards I’ve received in the past few months of 1945, the scrawled message from John on the other side is a surprise: “Finally, Aunt Christina—I’m coming home!”
My old friend Sadie Hamm also has reason to celebrate: her son Clyde was injured, but he is coming home with only a flesh wound to his upper arm and some shrapnel in his legs. She’s teary when she tells me the news. “It could’ve been so different for us,” she says. “When I think about what others have to endure . . .”
The postmistress Bertha Dorset’s two sons were drafted into the army, and her youngest died in France. And Gertrude Gibbons’s nephew, who grew up in Rockland and was trained as a fighter pilot, was killed over the Pacific. I never would have guessed, seeing the soldiers on Boston Common all those years ago, that another world war would engulf us. I couldn’t have imagined how much more there was to lose.
“You could drop Gertrude a note, you know,” Sadie says gently. “I’m sure it would mean a lot to her.”
“I could,” I say.
“A lot of time has passed.”
“It has.”
But though I feel a pang of sadness for Gertrude, I know I won’t reach out. I am too old, too stubborn. Her meddlesome insensitivity was something I could not—cannot, in the end—forgive.
And if I’m honest, there’s something else. Gertrude has become a stand-in for anyone who ever pitied me, didn’t try to understand me, abandoned me. She gives my bitterness a place to dwell.
IT TAKES SEVERAL weeks for John to travel by boat from Japan to Treasure Island in the South Pacific and, from there, by ferry to San Francisco, and another five days on a train to Boston, where he is officially discharged from the navy on Christmas Eve, 1945. He shows up at our house in uniform on Christmas Day with a chestful of medals, colorful packets of pastel-colored hard sugar candies called Konpeito that I don’t care for, and a newly acquired, un-Olson-like propensity to hug.
John is taller, thinner, and flinty featured, but still as mild-mannered as ever. “I can’t wait to pull my lobster boat out of the shed and get out on the water,” he tells me. “I’ve missed this place.”
He doesn’t waste any time getting settled. By spring 1946 he’s engaged to a local woman named Marjorie Jordan. “You’ll come to the wedding, won’t you, Aunt Christina?” he implores, taking my hand.
How will I ever get to a wedding when I can barely walk? “My land, you don’t need me at your wedding.”
“I most certainly do. You’re coming if I have to carry you there myself.”
I motion for him to come closer. I don’t know what to say, but I want to say something. I’m touched that he wants me there. “I’m glad you survived,” I tell him when he crouches down beside me.
Laughing, he kisses me on the cheek. “I’m glad I survived, too. So you’ll come?”
“I’ll come.”
Sadie claps her hands together when I tell her the news. “What fun! All right, then, we need to find you a dress. I’ll take you into Rockland.”
“Not store-bought. I’m going to make it myself.”
She looks at me doubtfully. “How long has it been since you sewed anything?”
“A while, I guess.” I hold my gnarled hands out, palms up. “I know they look frightful, but they work just fine.”
Sighing, she says, “If you insist, I’ll take you to get some fabric.”
The next morning Sadie helps me into her cream-colored Packard sedan and drives me to Senter Crane in Rockland. On the ride I begin to worry. How is she going to maneuver me inside? When she parks the car, Sadie leans over and pats my knee. As if reading my mind, she says, “Why don’t you let me go in and get you some samples? What would you like?”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “That’s probably best. Maybe a flowered silk?”
“You got it.”
I watch her whisk through the revolving door. She spins out ten minutes later with a dress pattern and three squares of fabric. “Thanks to rationing, no silk,” she says. “But I found some decent options.” She hands me the squares: a sky-blue dotted Swiss, a floral rayon, and light pink cotton broadcloth. I choose the pink, of course.
At home, in the dining room, I spread the fabric across the table and study the picture on the cover of the pattern: a thin, elegant woman who looks nothing like me in a dress with a fitted bodice and a long paneled skirt. I take the flimsy folded pattern out of its envelope and lay it over the cloth, find the pincushion in my sewing basket, and attempt to secure it. I’m startled to find that my fingers are shaking badly. Only with laborious effort do I manage to pin a section of the pattern to the cloth. I slice into it with my heavy silver scissors, but the line is jagged. When I open the sewing machine, I sit at it for a few minutes, running my hand over its curves, touching the still-sharp needle with my finger.
All at once I’m afraid. Afraid I’ll ruin the dress.
I sit back in my chair. It’s not just the dress, or my wretched hands; it’s all of it. I’m afraid for my future—a future of inevitable debilitation. Of increasing reliance on others. Of spending the rest of my years in this broken shell of a house.
When Sadie stops by a few days later, she runs her finger along the erratic line of the pins. Inspects the ragged cut. “You made a start,” she says gently. “Shall I take it over to Catherine Bailey in Maple Juice Cove to finish it up?” She doesn’t look in my eyes; I can tell she doesn’t want to embarrass me. When I nod, she says, “Right, then,” and carefully folds the pattern with the fabric, gathers the spools of pink thread and the instructions. Unfurling the yellow measuring tape from my sewing box, she encircles my waist, my hips, my bodice, scratches the numbers on a scrap of paper, and tucks it all into a bag.
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER I’m sitting in the kitchen, wearing my new dress, about to leave for the wedding, when Andy shows up, unannounced as usual, at the door.
Stopping abruptly in the doorway, he says, “My God, Christina.” He strides over and runs his hand down my sleeve, whispering to himself, “Magnificent. Like a faded lobster shell.”