The Wednesday Daughters Page 18

  Labradoodle. I remember Mom’s glee at first hearing that word. “You could name him Doodle,” she’d said, “and call him Doo-Doo!” The Wednesday Sisters had laughed and laughed together over that. She never had gotten any dog, though. Sammy and I had talked about getting her one after Dad died, but she was already coming to England regularly by then, and who would have cared for a puppy while she was overseas?

  Lolly Labradoodle. I turned the page and started reading. Lolly’s mother was a chocolate Lab and her father a poodle. They all lived together in a falling-down old mansion at the edge of a children’s park in Palo Alto, where, when Lolly was old enough—past the parvo vaccine? was Mom really writing about parvo vaccines in a children’s book?—she and her parents began taking their humans for walks.

  Eleanor Pardee Park. I recognized it in the illustration. The playground. The big sycamores that used to edge the park but had been cut down lest another limb fall, perhaps on a child playing on the playground this time. It had grieved Mom when they’d torn down those majestic trees and replaced them with twigs that would never amount to much in her lifetime; she’d been right about that.

  The old house Lolly lived in was the mansion that used to stand in the park, I supposed.

  “Nobody starts out being able to play the piano,” Lolly’s father assures her in the story. Since Lolly won’t play with the other children—all the happy quacks and chirps and meows of the others seem to scare her—her parents have put an old upright piano in her bedroom in the old mansion, and they try to teach her to play. The poodle plays ragtime, and the Lab plays quieter classical. They are awfully good at it, especially for animals with thick pads and short toes. Really, they have extraordinary reach with those toes, even taking into consideration the additional length of their nails, which they don’t much like to have clipped.

  The other children in the park stop to listen at first—it becomes part of what they love about the park, the possibility of piano music wafting out from the upstairs windows. But Lolly plays so poorly, it sends everyone fleeing. She tries to mimic her poodle dad’s ragtime. She tries her Lab mom’s classical. The harder she tries, the more often she hits the wrong notes.

  The Lab mom closes the piano and goes to an old-fashioned record player. “Close your eyes and listen,” she says to Lolly, and she plays first one record and then another: pop and show tunes and jazz. Lolly just looks sad. Her floppy brown ears droop low, and she sets her head on her paws, giving her mother the saddest look you’ve ever seen. On the sixth record, though, Lolly’s ears perk up, and in the last illustration, she’s wailing on the piano while, outside the window, the other animal children have a grand time in the park. The sheet music on the piano has no text, only a familiar pattern of watercolor notes.

  “It isn’t quite done,” Graham said. “I thought it was, but your mum, she was still working on it. She meant to hold on to it until you and Kevin had your first child, I believe. She would have wanted you to have it now, as would I.”

  He would? This brother who didn’t even mourn her?

  He tilted his head slightly, considering me.

  I paged backward through the book for an excuse to look away. I turned from the happy puppy piano player back through her struggle to learn the music, all the way to the front cover, the cute little Labradoodle. Lolly Labradoodle. When I’d told Mom that Sam and I considered getting her one, she’d said it was Kevin and me who needed a Labradoodle, they were wonderful with children and didn’t wreak havoc with allergies.

  “I’m very good at what I do,” I said to Graham. “The law.”

  Graham slid the book back and opened it again, to the first few pages: the Lab mom and the poodle dad with their little Labradoodle in environmentally correct cloth diapers.

  “It’s comforting, that: having a defined role,” he said.

  Graham Wyndham V, lord of Ainsley’s End. A role that had been defined for generations.

  He turned the pages of the book, stopping at the last scene with the piano, and smiled. “The notes on the sheet music, your mum was quite particular that they be just so. I believe they are a few measures from a band named … was it Ruckus Girls?”

  I shut my eyes to the sunlight streaming through the glass surrounding us, willing me to grow, like a plant. “Riot grrrls?”

  Bratmobile. Bikini Kill. Music that, my last summer in college, Mom was forever asking me to turn down.

  “It may have been,” Graham said.

  “I had no idea what Mom was doing here,” I said. “I don’t know that I gave it much thought, what life she might have that didn’t revolve around me. I didn’t even know she could paint.”

  He closed the book again, his touch lingering on the carefully drawn lettering of the title. “It wouldn’t be the first time I would be wrong about a thing, but … Your mum, she once tried to draw here in the greenhouse, channeling Beatrix Potter the way she did. Quite honestly, I’m afraid her stick figures were a sorry sight. Stick figures, literally, as she was trying to draw a bare branch in a vase.”

  “This isn’t her studio?”

  “It is. Yes, of course. We shared it, your mum and I did.”

  The realization dawning: all my mother’s characters propped up around me warmed in the sunlight, the possums and spiders, the goose in her purple vest at home against the backdrop of dying vines beyond walls of glass. “You did these, Graham? The illustrations?”

  But he didn’t even mourn her.

  He turned to the glass wall and set a palm flat against it, the wall that had let in the sun but kept out the cold, the wind, the rain as he and Mom had worked side by side, in companionable silence. In his posture, I saw how wrong I was about him, about so many things. He was what he was: a proper British gentleman from a proper British estate, playing his role. A man who was expected to control his emotions and was doing his best.

  “She used to say we were two different halves of one thing, in different bodies,” he said.

  From the Journals of Ally Tantry

  10.7.2011, Near Sawrey. Bea took me to Hawkshead so she could show me Mr. Heelis’s law offices today.

  —I always feel very dumpy without my husband, she said.

  She meant to comfort me, I suppose. She meant to be telling me she understood how dumpy I feel without Jim, and that she didn’t mind keeping me company through my dumpiness. That she knew how I felt because she’d lost Norman Warne even if she hadn’t lost William Heelis.

  —I always hate to go to London because it takes me so very far away from William, she said. Also, because no one there remembers to call me Mrs. Heelis.

  I actually smiled a little; I never think of her as Mrs. Heelis, either.

  William Heelis’s offices have been turned into a gallery now, filled with Bea’s art, but she ignored that. She spent forever taking me about the room that was his private office, which someone had the good sense to leave as it was when he was a solicitor, with his desk and his typewriter, his law books in an alcove across the hall. One could imagine the window view hasn’t changed much from when he worked here, although I suppose the line of tourists in T-shirts with odd sayings do present a different prospect than Mr. Heelis enjoyed.

  —I can’t imagine why Mr. Heelis left his golf clubs here in his office, of all places, Bea said.

  She was not thrilled with the idea of going upstairs; the top floor has been converted into space to show her drawings and paintings. Virtually all the originals belong to the gallery, although they show only part of the collection at any one time. Right now the things they have on display center around The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse, published over a hundred years ago.

  Hope would love to see the original painting of the final scene in Mrs. Tittlemouse, where Mr. Jackson is leaning in through the window to participate in the tea party without getting dirt on Mrs. Tittlemouse’s floor, being handed acorn cupfuls of honeydew. “Haycorn cupfuls,” that’s the way Hope used to say it. As I imagine her own daughter will say it someday.
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  —Allison, Bea admonishes. Let’s not go into Mr. McGregor’s garden, now.

  We’re nowhere near Mr. McGregor’s garden, we’re again at the charming tea shop down the road from Hill Top, but I take her point.

  —I wish Hope would write, I say. Not for anyone but herself if she doesn’t want to. Just to help her sort out how she feels.

  I wish Hope had been with me to see Bea’s original work. Somehow, if you imagine Bea creating her stories at all, you imagine she just pulled out her watercolors and painted, then penned in some text. In fact, there were many, many sketches of the characters—and everything else, but the ones I noticed most were the characters.

  —And the mushrooms, Bea reminds me.

  —And the mushroom drawings, Bea, I concede.

  —People do underestimate how many years I spent drawing and painting my pet bunny, and the cabbages in the Fawe Park garden, and frogs and hedgehogs and anything else I could capture long enough to study and sketch. Oh, the hours I spent hunched over mushrooms as a young woman. I was only an amateur, but the paper I wrote about the symbiotic nature of lichens—

  —Yes, you’ve told me about that, Bea, I say.

  She looks out over Esthwaite Water, her favorite view, while I make notes about a quote from one of Bea’s letters, which I’d seen hung in a simple frame on the wall of Mr. Heelis’s offices—the most moving thing I’ve seen here yet:

  Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough lands seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton grass where my old legs will never take me again.

  I said “Oh, Bea” right out loud, there in the place that had been her husband’s offices, where she must have come often on any excuse to see this late-blooming love of her life. Such a stunning few words. So moving. I keep returning to them, trying to sort out why they’re so effective. Maybe because the beginning carries the suggestion of going somewhere, as if she’s just woken and is planning her day. Then the turn at the end: she’s looking backward on a whole life rather than forward to an afternoon, and all that hopefulness and beauty at the start of the sentence belongs to a past she can’t ever have again.

  Very moving. And perhaps an argument for sad endings. I will have to think about this.

  There were all her sketches, and her completed paintings, some with notes around the edges that you can see if the frame doesn’t cut off the words, things like “Make his fur the same color as all the other paintings, but don’t alter the picture when doing it.” Lines across the bottoms of some of the pictures indicate the width should be, say, three inches, although the original picture might be larger.

  —Some think I’m too particular, Bea says, but a picture that is too small or too large can spoil an entire book.

  —Hope is compulsive like that, I say. She gets it from her father. It makes her good at what she does, but it can be a challenge to live with.

  —Can it?

  I give her a look, and she sighs.

  —Anna Page is more like I am, I say. Easier.

  —Kathleen’s Anna Page? Allison, I’m sorry to say that Anna Page is easier than precisely no one.

  Well, perhaps not. And yet I imagine she would be easy with Graham. Why is that?

  —Making the match for the matchmaker, Bea says. But do you suppose Anna Page would be good for Graham?

  —She does seem to order the dinner plate she least prefers and leave it all behind for the waitress to clear, I concede, but he would be good for her if she would let him be.

  I pour tea into our cups and return to my journal.

  —Do you truly mean to write about me? Bea asks.

  —I hope so, Bea.

  —And Water Lily, she says. You can’t write a whole book about me without including Water Lily.

  —We’ll see about that, Bea, I say.

  She looks a bit niggly in response. Niggly. I love that word.

  —All this talk about Hope and Anna Page, Bea says. Sometimes I have the sense that it’s your own life more than mine that you’ve come to the Lakes to learn about. I used to imagine it was your mother, but now I see it was more than that.

  I look out at the water again, trying to imagine my mother as a young woman who thought she would live her whole life here when she is in fact about to leave.

  —If you must write about me, Bea says, I think I ought not to be dead in your book. What good comes of writing about a dead old woman sheep keeper?

  —Beatrix Christ, I say. I was thinking more of a dead old woman who wrote children’s stories that will long survive us all.

  Bea basks in this for a moment.

  —But I’m much more interesting alive than dead, you know, she says.

  And the truth is, I can’t disagree with that. The truth is that all during this conversation—all during this tea while I’ve scribbled notes and Bea has contemplated the view—I’ve been thinking about the quote I saw on Mr. Heelis’s office wall, thinking it would be a lovely thing to take Bea up onto the fells again, if ever our old legs could manage the task.

  The first thing I did when I arrived is go through the back kitchen ceiling, I don’t think I ran any risk, it went down wholesale so it was not scratchy to my stockings, & the rafters were too near together to permit my slipping through. The joiner & plasterer were much alarmed and hauled me out.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, AFTER A VISIT TO HER NEWLY PURCHASED HILL TOP FARM, IN A SEPTEMBER 30, 1906, LETTER TO MILLIE WARNE

  “LOOK AT THIS, AUNT KATH,” I SAID, NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE WE arrived at Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm the next morning, and paid the ticket price, and passed the time waiting for our turn to go in by wandering the lane where Potter drew herself into The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. Mom read me the book so many times that I recognized at once where Potter had stood in the background watching Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria flee with Potter’s own wheelbarrow—which they’d stolen and filled with bundles—after being caught trying to make Tom Kitten into a roly-poly pudding.

  Our group—Anna Page and Julie and I, together with Aunt Kath and Graham—were about as many people as they let into the modest little house at a time, so we had it nearly to ourselves when our turn came.

  “Are those her shoes?” Aunt Kath asked, indicating a pair tucked under a chair by the fireplace—shoes my mom would have studied in detail, trying to make out some truth about their owner. Shoes she would have imagined walking in, for the book she meant to write. Shoes “Bea” wore in the pages of Mom’s journal sometimes, and yet not. The shoes Mom wrote about were lace-up. These were gardening clogs.

  “That’s Potter’s hat,” Graham said, touching Aunt Kath’s arm and directing her attention to a fedora hanging by the mantel. The touch seemed so easy, as if, in the space of two days spent getting to know each other, they’d become intimate. Anna Page looked even more discomfited by the touch than I was, although this was what she’d intended, her mother and Graham hitting it off. The uneasy set of her chin was very like when she tells the story of introducing Jamie and Isaac, a triple date of Julie with Noah and Anna Page with some guy whose name she no longer remembers, all at the outdoor tables overlooking the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford, where Kevin and I like to go late at night.

  A year. It had been a year since Jamie had died. It was the anniversary of her death.

  “Is this Potter’s umbrella?” Julie asked.

  The docent answered that even after she married William Heelis, Potter had kept Mr. Warne’s umbrella and pipe. She’d died with her wedding ring from Heelis on her left hand and her engagement ring from Warne on her right.

  “Beatrix remained friendly with Mr. Warne’s sister her whole long life,” Aunt Kath said, “but do you s’pose that was truly friendship or simply shared grief?”

  Julie looked a bit stricken by the words, but if Aunt Kath noticed, she didn’t show it. “Lordy,” she continued, “it’s a hard thing to let go of a love who has died.”
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  I took Julie’s arm to comfort her, to comfort me, and I said, “Look: the clock from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers.”

  As if to assure me of my memory, the book itself sat beside the clock, opened to the page with Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit standing on the landing at the turn of the stairs, right in front of the clock. On the adjacent page: Some of the walls were four feet thick, and there used to be queer noises inside them, as if there might be a little secret staircase. Certainly there were odd little jagged doorways in the wainscot, and things disappeared at night—especially cheese and bacon. It was something, how Potter took disgusting critters who were destroying her home—rats in the walls, for heaven’s sake—and turned them into adorable storybook characters who charmed children and adults alike.

  Upstairs, in the room to the right, Aunt Kath showed us a copy of a rejection letter she found on a desk in the corner. “Well, if that doesn’t put pepper in the gumbo. How does an editor have the nerve to reject Beatrix Potter?”

  In another room—a small bedroom with bed curtains Potter herself embroidered—I found a beautiful dollhouse, with Tom Thumb’s ceramic ham inside. It was shiny yellow streaked with red, like the ham that jerks off the plate and rolls under the table in The Tale of Two Bad Mice, provoking poor frustrated Tom Thumb to have at it with tongs and a shovel. Tongs like Julie had thrust at Anna Page, opening up a mean little place in my heart. Bang, bang, smash, smash! The ham flew all into pieces, for underneath the shiny paint it was made of nothing but plaster! Tom and Hunca Munca had broken all the dollhouse food then: the lobsters and the fruit and the pudding, which I hadn’t realized meant not just Jell-O pudding but any kind of dessert. They put the fish in “the red-hot crinkly paper fire” because it wouldn’t come off the plate, but it wouldn’t burn, either.