The Wednesday Daughters Page 17

  “England’s fourth highest peak,” Graham said. “But it’s farther north, near Bassenthwaite.”

  Anna Page, frowning at the little intellectual skirmish, ran her hand through her hair, which was limp and lifeless today, devoid of its usual wildness. She wandered into the cabin and to the back of the launch, where she stood looking through the clear glass to the receding shore. I wanted to join her, but I hung back, afraid I’d inadvertently say something about her father. How could Aunt Kath take Uncle Lee back after all those years apart? Were all our parents more complicated than we’d ever imagined?

  Robbie said, “If you want closer to home, ‘The leafless trees and every icy crag …’ ”

  Aunt Kath said, “ ‘Tinkled like iron; while far distant’ … hills? Lordy, I have no memory these days, Robbie. Though not for lack of loving poetry. That’s Wordsworth, though. ‘Hawkshead.’ ”

  “Hawkshead is just over the hill,” Graham said, nodding but not taking his hand from the rail to point.

  “And ‘hills’ is right, Kath,” Robbie said. “ ‘The leafless trees and every icy crag / Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills / Into the tumult sent an alien sound / Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars’ ”—he smiled at Julie on the word, but didn’t pause—“ ‘Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west / The orange sky of evening died away.’ ”

  “ ‘Melancholy not unnoticed,’ ” Julie repeated. “That’s lovely, isn’t it?”

  I wondered if Wordsworth had always written like that, or if it came with practice; if, as with everything else in life, one could become a better writer. How much difference did the place where you were writing make? Did Mom write better here than she did at home?

  I would write best in Big Sur, I thought, and I wondered for the first time if Kevin missed living on the coast. It hadn’t occurred to me when we moved in together that he might have been making a sacrifice for me. I’d assumed without asking that he’d lived in Half Moon Bay because he couldn’t afford the Palo Alto side of the hills, and he hadn’t dispelled me of that. But it would be different for him, spending the hour or two he took to write every afternoon at the Peet’s coffee shop in the strip mall across from the high school rather than at some perch overlooking the Pacific. Was that why he sometimes wrote in the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford, wearing fingerless gloves in the wintertime?

  “It reminds me of ‘The Crier of Claife,’ Robbie,” Aunt Kath said. “Not the images, not the whole poem, but that line.”

  Robbie said he didn’t suppose there was an artist or poet who wouldn’t use the stars here, and he started talking about several who had.

  We were approaching the Ainsley’s End pier when Anna Page rejoined us, the motor already cut, the boat drifting quietly toward the rubber tire stops, Robbie at the ready with the docking rope. As he bounded out first, his strong legs and strong shoulders moving easily onto the pier, Aunt Kath asked if he wouldn’t join us tomorrow for whatever we were going to do. “Perhaps a Wordsworth walk?” she suggested to Anna Page and Julie and me, as if she cared not one wit about all the attention from Graham that Anna Page had arranged to have showered on her. To Robbie, she said, “To see ‘the sunbeams play and the vapours rest’?”

  Anna Page looked from Robbie to Graham to the stone chimneys of Ainsley’s End, all you could see of it from here.

  “Yes, a Wordsworth hike,” Graham said. “Rest assured, Kathleen, that I know much less about poetry than I do about Cumbrian history, and I’ll leave my lecture notes at home.”

  Aunt Kath smiled then, a big old smile.

  “Shall we meet at Wordsworth’s Wishing Gate?” Robbie suggested. Then, with a glance at Julie, “Perhaps a breakfast hike? We might find a morning glory in bloom.”

  “I don’t believe they’re in season,” Julie said, her gray eyes under her straight brows more lighthearted than I’d seen them in a long time, her right hand unconsciously rubbing at the empty ring finger of her left.

  “Aren’t they, though?” Robbie grinned. “You might be surprised.”

  We had a pleasant dry spell, with the occasional still days.

  Today is wild rain. I have been in Little Langdale and Coniston on days when the fells were very lovely.… The fells are never twice alike.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, IN A FEBRUARY 28, 1938, LETTER TO JOSEPHINE BANNER

  THE OLD WOMAN WHO RANG OUR PURCHASES AT THE SPECIALTY GROCER’S the next morning was short and round—not five feet, with hair thinning to almost nothing, her visible scalp vulnerable and endearing. As Graham paid, Aunt Kath asked her whether anyone still used farthings (no) and how many there were to a pence. The clerk said to Graham, “I’m too young to know that, now, aren’t I, Lord Wyndham,” giving us all our first laugh of the day even before we’d met Robbie at the wooden footbridge that crossed to Rydal Water and Grasmere Lake. As I laughed, I tucked an orange I’d chosen into the pocket with Mom’s ashes, remembering her standing at the kitchen sink peeling them for me when I was young, the sharp, sweet citrus scent remaining on her hands later, when she read to me.

  Robbie was at Rydal Water when we arrived, and we set off “like a herd of turtles on peanut butter,” as Aunt Kath put it, pausing on the footbridge just steps into the five-mile loop, Robbie quoting a few lines about “the earth, and every common sight” seeming “the glory and the freshness of a dream.” It was a glorious and fresh day, walkers offering “Hiya” greetings—one of those funny expressions Mom had so loved—as we made our way along a path between a small lake and a red-brackened hillside that rose up to a crag Graham told us was Loughrigg. The path crested at a stretch of rapids connecting Rydal Water and Grasmere Lake, where two men in a canoe dug frantically with oars only to be caught up on a protruding tree root and turned around backward—a metaphor for something, surely, Robbie said.

  Aunt Kath responded in a fair mimic of the thin-haired clerk, “I’m too young to know that, now, aren’t I?”

  Anna Page would have done a better imitation than her mother if the exhaustion of her father’s stroke hadn’t settled so firmly into her brown eyes. Did it irritate her to have her mother flirting so easily while her father lay in a hospital back home? Not that Aunt Kath owed anything to Uncle Lee, but still, her easy interaction with Robbie and Graham did irritate me. I hadn’t slept any better than Anna Page had. We’d all moved into big private rooms at Ainsley’s End; Aunt Kath, after we showed her Mom’s cottage, had turned to Graham and said, “You did say you have room enough for these girls and then some in that big ol’ house of yours, didn’t you? Three engines runnin’ and not a one of them has the sense to drive.” I’d spent much of the night looking out the leaded glass window to the Claife Heights woods, though, half expecting to see the light of the Crier looking for his wife’s bones.

  From the end of Grasmere Lake, we dropped down into the town where Wordsworth was buried. “He had two wives?” I asked, seeing two women’s names on the tombstone: Dorothy and Mary—two wives, like Graham’s father, who married Graham’s Indian mother and my mother’s mother both.

  Robbie reminded us that Dorothy was Wordsworth’s sister.

  “He had five children, two of whom died in childhood,” Aunt Kath said.

  “Five with Mary,” Robbie said. “He fathered a child out of wedlock as well, in Paris.”

  “ ‘Strange fits of passion have I known,’ ” Aunt Kath said.

  “ ‘And I will dare to tell, / But in the Lover’s ear alone,’ ” Robbie replied.

  In the lover’s ear alone. The words echoed as we wandered through the poet’s Dove Cottage, an unassuming white stucco house that reminded me of Kevin’s and mine—modest and in need of more windows. “My lover,” Kevin always called me. Not “my wife” but “my lover.” I had liked that so much, and then I hadn’t. How does that happen in a marriage? The small irritations blister and scab as romance gives way to a more stable reality that finds you having given up some part of yourself that you can’t bear to have lost.

>   “Your mama sure loved it here, didn’t she?” Aunt Kath asked, taking my arm when we set off again, as if she had no idea how many discussions Anna Page and I had had about how to keep her from joining us at the Lakes. We were headed uphill and across a dirt path Graham and Robbie called “the coffin road,” a path over which, in the days when the only consecrated cemetery in the area was in Grasmere, coffins from Ambleside were carried by hand. The deep red bracken below the high road stretched down to a green hillside, beyond which a wreck was being cleared on the road we’d traveled to get to the footbridge, a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.

  “What do you think when you see an accident?” Anna Page asked Graham.

  Her mother frowned and said her name, a warning. I half expected Aunt Kath to tell her not to act ugly, as she had so many times not just to Anna Page or Little Lee or Lacy but to all of us Wednesday Kids. Anna Page, undaunted, told Graham, “I hope everyone involved will have completed organ donor registrations and will be matches for my patients.” Strange fits of passion, indeed.

  “Your grandmother was from these parts, you know,” Aunt Kath said to me.

  I stepped on a twig across the path, snapping it, catching a glimpse of the smooth blue of the lake below us before turning away from it. “From Manchester,” I corrected.

  “So you know about your grandmama disowning your mama,” she said. “Your mama was so good at keeping focused on the plum in the pudding that I wasn’t sure she’d ever shared that grief with you.”

  On the lake, a lone duck settled on the water beside an abandoned boathouse.

  “I let your mama down,” she said. “I didn’t stop to think what she went through all those years of having lost her own mama but thinking somehow, if she were just a better daughter, her parents would come back to her. It about broke her poor heart until she had you, I suppose. I do think you were all she needed in this whole world, though, at least for a spell.”

  I watched a second duck join the first as I tried to hold back a deep wave of sorrow, thinking of what Anna Page had said about needing to tuck some of Mom into her pocket, too, thinking of all the years Aunt Kath had been my mother’s friend, more years than Anna Page had been taking care of me in her odd little way, decades more than Julie and I had been friends.

  “It must have hurt Mom,” I said. “Her parents disowning her.” Several other ducks had joined the pair on the pond, while a yellow-beaked blackbird settled on the boathouse roof, watching them from a distance. “It hurt me, and they were only my grandparents,” I admitted. “It made me feel …” I looked ahead to Graham, his skin, like my brother’s, not light but lighter than mine. “It made me feel wrong.”

  Aunt Kath touched a hand to my back, saying, “Oh, Hope, there is nothing wrong about you, honey. Every dog has a few fleas, but even your fleas have great big ol’ hearts.”

  Robbie and Julie, quite a ways ahead, paused beside a large, flat slab of granite. I began walking again, and Aunt Kath fell in beside me. “Who wouldn’t like it here?” she said. “Especially someone like your mama, who always did prefer a quiet sunset to fireworks exploding and falling to earth.”

  “And then Graham was here.”

  She looked ahead to Graham. “This little brother she’d not known she had was here to greet her. Imagine that.”

  We walked along in silence, catching up with the others at a large flat boulder tucked up next to a dry stone wall: Coffin Stone, or Resting Stone, a small white marker beside it explained. A place the porters rested their heavy loads on their sad journeys across the Coffin Road. Wordsworth’s coffin would have rested here, I supposed, and his wife’s and his sister’s.

  I fingered the orange in my pocket. My mother’s little puzzle box would seem so insubstantial resting here.

  “ ‘O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,’ ” Robbie said as a light wind kicked up.

  “Wordsworth began writing The Prelude when he was twenty-eight,” Graham said, “and it wasn’t published until after he died, at eighty. Can you imagine that?”

  Anna Page smiled at him, delighted for the first time that day, and responded in a nearly perfect imitation of the clerk’s voice, “I’m too young to imagine that, now, aren’t I?”

  The two of them laughed together.

  “The work of a lifetime,” Graham said.

  When everyone made ready to set off again, Anna Page asked me to wait with her a minute. She thought I would welcome the relief from her mom. “Graham and Ma seem to be hitting it off, though, don’t they?” she said.

  She sat on the stone, and I sat beside her, the cold seeping up from under me.

  “Ape, is it true what Julie said about you and your sister’s fiancé?” I asked.

  “Good Lord, where did that come from?” She looked down at the water, the ducks all floating together but the yellow-beaked blackbird no longer atop the abandoned boathouse. “It wasn’t like that, the way Julie says it was,” she said. “I didn’t know Lacy and that turd were going to meet. How could I know they were going to meet?”

  “You brought the guy to the beach.”

  Kevin had built sand castles that day. Dad was alive. Mom and Jamie, too.

  “I was still seeing him myself, though,” Anna Page said. “How could I know they were going to get together?”

  “You brought Kevin to that tailgate party.”

  “Oh, Hope.” She looked at her feet, the weedy ground around the stone. “It wasn’t like that with Kevin. It wasn’t like that at all with Kevin.”

  I stared toward the imposing crag across the lake. “What was it like with Kevin?”

  “It wasn’t like anything with Kevin! God, Hope, Lacy’s guy was a jerk! Didn’t you know that from the start? Of course I told her I’d slept with him. She might have married him! You dreaded that for her as much as I did. You know you did. I couldn’t let her marry him.”

  “Because you’d slept with him.”

  “Because he was a jerk.”

  “You didn’t sleep with him?”

  She looked at me, but I didn’t look back. “You think I made that up to scare my sister away from some guy I didn’t want her to marry?” she said. “Jeez, Hope.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets, found the bit of Mom under the orange, the ashes that weren’t ashes, that I didn’t want to share. “So you did sleep with him,” I said.

  “I slept with him before she met him, Hope. Before. And it’s not like it meant anything. It was just sex.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her when she first started seeing him? Why wait till they were engaged?” Wondering if she’d ever told Mom about all the men, or any of them. Thinking she wouldn’t have, that she wouldn’t have wanted Mom to know.

  “I don’t know, Hope. If I’d seen where it was going, absolutely I would have. And maybe I should have seen that. Maybe I should have known Lacy would fall for such an absolute jerk.”

  “One you’d had sex with.”

  “Would you want the wrath of the whole Wednesday Gang coming down on your sex life before Kevin?”

  “I had no sex life before Kevin!”

  We looked down the Coffin Road toward the others, hoping they were far enough ahead not to have heard.

  I had no sex life before Kevin and almost none with him in the past months.

  “Not even with Rajiv?” Anna Page asked, the disbelief in her voice hurting more than I had imagined. But Rajiv wasn’t the kind of guy who would marry a woman he’d slept with. Rajiv wasn’t the kind of guy who would marry anyone who’d ever had sex.

  “Pffft,” Anna Page said, the way Jamie used to. “Rajiv was a jerk.”

  The kind of guy she was forever sleeping with and tossing off. But if she’d slept with Rajiv, she wouldn’t have told me, any more than she would have told Lacy, except that Lacy had gotten engaged. And if she’d slept with Kevin, she wouldn’t admit that, either, because she liked Kevin, because she didn’t think he was a jerk. And maybe I didn’t want to know. What would be the po
int? If she told me she’d slept with him, I could never turn away from that, and if she denied it, I would have no way to know whether she was telling the truth or protecting me from it.

  I once had a mouse which must have been cross bred.… It was all brown except a white mark down its face. It was ferociously tame. I used to let it run about in the evenings & when I wanted to catch it I flapped a pocket handkcf. in the middle of the room—or rooms—when it would come out & fight, leaping at the hdcf.

  I think I remember it was that same mouse which got into trouble with the authorities by biting out a circular hole in a sheet on my bed!

  —BEATRIX POTTER, IN A NOVEMBER 27, 1920, LETTER TO JESSIE WYATT

  AFTER TEA IN THE PROSPECT BACK AT AINSLEY’S END, I FOUND MYSELF following Graham out through the perfectly geometric herb garden, past the rose garden and the last of the fall squash vines to a greenhouse I’d not seen before, inside of which the only green was paint: watercolors of rabbits and possums and ducks on small canvases, Gabby the goose in her purple velvet vest from the story Mom had written for Sam and me. There were Petey the Parakeet and Oyster Joe, each on an easel, and Aaron Anaconda, who was Sammy’s favorite. When Aunt Frankie had made me a replacement stuffed Mr. Jackson, she’d made a stuffed Aaron for him.

  “This is where my mother painted?” I asked.

  “Your mum?” Graham looked as if the idea of my mother painting was as improbable to him as it was to me. “I wanted to … Your mum would have wanted you …”

  He extracted a funny little book from an intricate chest of inlaid wood flowers and vines finished to a high polish—a chest very like my mother’s puzzle boxes, which surely she’d chosen for this place where all her paintings lived. The book had no real cover; it was just pages hole-punched and bound together with yarn Mom might have gotten from Aunt Frankie. “The True Tale of Lolly Labradoodle,” it was titled, and on the front page was a watercolor of the cutest brown Labradoodle. Really, you just wanted to pull him into your lap and bury your face in his fur, which was long and wavy, neither the tight curls of a poodle nor the straight short hair of a Lab. The puppy’s eyes were buried under all that inviting fur, his ears floppy and furry, only his button of a nose and his bright pink tongue giving non-fuzzy texture to his face.