THE SCENT OF apple blossoms drifted in and made everyone light-headed. The girls chattered like squirrels, and I let it go on, remembering my days at school. Finally, I raised my hand. The hall became quiet, and I gave the news: we would begin the waltz. A cheer rose up, but I cut it short. “Don’t be fooled,” I said. “The steps are not difficult, but the grace is found only with patience and practice.”
I put out my arms as though holding a partner and performed the dance. Then I took the violin and played a song I knew only as “Laura’s Waltz.” I bowed the melody three times, telling the young ladies to remember it, for we would dance while the violin was silent. “We will hum the melody, at first,” I said, “then just hear it on our own.” Doubtful looks came back at me, but I had seen it taught this way in Coxsackie. According to Miss Burchett, it would break the habit of following the music. I didn’t have much of an opinion on that, but it did solve the problem of seven dancers.
The girls from the upper village formed pairs. Evelyn and Dorothy made the third. Lydia and I, the fourth. I had danced with my girlfriends at school, so taking the man’s part was not new to me. “The gentleman,” I said, “places his right hand on his partner’s back, the lady her left on his shoulder. Dance as though you have a fat pillow between you.”
As I spoke, Lydia and I assumed the posture. The others followed. When all were ready, I gave a nod. We stumbled with the melody right away, the girls unable to hold their laughter. We tried again to the same result. After that, we did better.
When the lesson was done, the girls put on their cloaks and began to leave, except for Lydia, who walked to the open window. Once the others had left, I went over to her.
“What’s out there?”
“Horses and hay wagons,” she said, looking at the fields.
“And a couple of dogs, it would seem.”
“Yes. Down by the creek. They’ve got something up a tree.”
“You danced very well today,” I said.
Lydia kept looking out and didn’t reply. I thought I should say something more, but before I could she turned and set her green eyes on me. “Professor Lobdell, would you take me as a student on the violin?”
I held back a small laugh. Such drama. “I am a music teacher, Miss Watson. Of course, I will take you. You will need to speak to your mother.”
A wisp of a smile crossed Lydia’s face. “Mother has already agreed.”
* * *
I sat in my room, lamp lit, pen in hand. My letter home was weeks overdue, but one fear or another had kept me from it. I didn’t want to tell more lies, and what could I say about my new life that wouldn’t be one? Worse, Basket Creek now seemed like a story someone had told to me.
I had lived on this earth for twenty-five years. Those years held my girlhood, the barn out back, my first horse, my sisters, and the daughter I had birthed—all that had ever been real to me. But now, here were these few weeks in costume where no one knew me and nothing looked familiar. If one of these worlds was to be the real and the other the dream, you might think that two decades of life with family would be the waking state and the brief costume drama the dream. And that’s the way it was—at first.
But in just a handful of weeks, that changed. The costume drama was now my waking state, and what I had thought was my real life had become the dream. All my anchors had come loose—even my Helen, I’m ashamed to say. I had set out with her in mind, to find freedom for us both, but now I didn’t know how the pieces fit. There was no script for me to read, not that there is for anyone. My plan was simply to get through each day without being discovered, everything else to be revealed, including how to present myself in a letter.
I thought I might write things in a general way, simply telling Helen and the others that I was alive and they were still in my heart. I hadn’t finished the first sentence when it occurred to me the letter couldn’t be sent. It would bear the mark of Honesdale. Given half a chance, brother John would travel some distance to find me or spy on me or spoil whatever good thing I had found. I thought about handing the letter to one of the barge captains at Blandin’s and asking him to mail it in Kingston. But what man would not be curious as to why? He would open the letter, and I’d be tarred and feathered for sure.
So there it was. I could not write the truth, nor could I send a lie. I was alone—like Jonah, swallowed whole and spat up on a foreign shore. And by having started and stopped a letter, I had opened the gate to memories that ran in my mind as though through a lantern. I saw a little girl playing with a spotted dog by a creek in Westerlo. Then that creek became the Basket and the little girl turned into Helen.
At the start, I thought she was part of me, so firmly attached in taking my milk. But once Helen began to talk, there was never again a doubt about that. She was who she was and had something of her own to say about everything, often talking to herself or to imagined friends. Once I heard her scold a toy horse that Father had carved, telling it not to be naughty. She was mimicking me from the day before when I had lost my temper, and I, no doubt, had been imitating my mother.
Helen slept in a crib beside me, and if she woke from a bad dream I would wake also. Once, when she was two, I heard her crying and brought her to my bed. “Mommy,” she said as I lay down beside her, “what made Aunt Elsa die? Was she bad?”
“No, dearest,” I said. “She was old. She got sick and died.”
“Am I going to die?”
I wanted to reassure her, but I knew that I mustn’t lie—about this, of all things. “Yes, my dearest girl. We all die.”
“But I don’t want to,” she cried.
I gathered her to me and told her that she didn’t have to worry about that for a long, long time. I didn’t try to explain heaven to her young mind. Indeed, how to explain it to anyone? Helen might imagine a heaven with all of us brought together before the hearth at our home on Basket Creek. But I might imagine us before the hearth in Westerlo when I was young and all seemed safe. And so when we all do meet again in heaven, whose fire do we sit before? And who would be the grown-ups and who the children?
* * *
Miss Watson’s violin lessons began the next week in the hour after dance class. I expected her to be an eager learner. She wasn’t. She showed nothing of the intent she displayed when she proposed the instruction, acting almost put upon as I tried to teach her the strings. I began to wonder if she really cared about the violin, or then again, perhaps I was pushing too hard.
At the start of the third lesson, I thought to try a little conversation, asking Miss Watson if she had always lived in Bethany. She said she had and asked where I was from. I told her I grew up on a farm in New York, and that much was true. But I knew the smaller past I had, the safer I would be, so I invented one without siblings and told an awful lie. “My parents died when I was at the academy in Coxsackie,” I said sadly, “in the year of the fever.”
I held my breath and waited for lightning to strike me dead, the vigil broken by Lydia’s voice. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, her eyes filling with sympathy. I felt the urge to invent more tragedy but instead asked about her family.
“They’re on all sides of me,” she said, lifting her eyes to the heavens. “If you counted aunts and cousins, we’d almost be a beehive. My uncle Karl has a farm north of town where he raises horses. In the summers I used to ride with my cousin Jason, but then he left to find his own land in Minnesota.”
“And your father—his business is trees?”
“Trees, yes, trees,” said Lydia, her arms extending as though they were branches. “The bigger and more beautiful, the sooner it shall be killed.”
I felt myself smile. “I think, Miss Watson, most people would describe what your father does as harvesting.”
Lydia sat back in the chair. “I know. There should be no complaint. We want for nothing.”
“But you seem to have one.”
An awkward silence followed. I had gone where I should not have. “Don’t pay me any mind,” I said trying to go back. “We all have—”
“No, you’re right,” said Lydia, interrupting. “But it’s not the trees. It’s not. It’s just … ” Her eyes went to the floor, and her voice went there also. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father make my mother laugh. I’ve often wondered how it was that they married.”
“Oh, I’m certain they have attachments,” I said, trying now to fluff the pillow. “The simplest of reasons are sometimes the hardest to see.” I had just mimicked my Aunt Bertha who used to say vacant things like that when I was a girl. Lydia didn’t like it any more than I had.
“Then tell me, Professor,” she asked, “what are your simple reasons—the ones that brought you to Honesdale?”
My thoughts ran about like ants while I did my best to look composed. “Well, if you must know, Miss Watson, I came here, because I was told that Honesdale was a place of unrealized social aspiration.”
“Oh, my,” said Lydia, her hands meeting in a gleeful clap. “Are you here to fulfill that aspiration or frustrate it?”
I held back a smile. “At the moment, Miss Watson, I’m more concerned with what might be said if no music is heard from here.” And with that, I began to play the violin, so that someone passing might hear music, as though a lesson were being taught. First I played my part, then hers, that of a student who is learning and none too well. I played so badly that Lydia brought her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing.
“This is the best lesson so far,” she declared as I put the violin down.
“Yes,” I agreed. “You’ve played not a note, and if it goes on like this, I won’t accept payment.”
“Well, I can’t bring the quarter back and keep coming. What would you have me do with it?”
I thought for a moment, playing her game. “You go to church on Sunday?”
“Yes, of course. It’s boring. I hate it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But since you’ll be there anyway, just slip it in the plate.”
Lydia smiled as she considered the plan. Then she shook her head. “No, Professor Lobdell. I think it would be best if I gave you the quarter and learned to play my own bad notes.”