The Wednesday Daughters Page 7

  —I have a New York publisher who’s interested in it, I told him.

  It isn’t exactly untrue; Kath thinks her house might publish it if it offers “some fresh angle on Potter.” I don’t know why I didn’t just tell him I’m trying to find out about my mother—to say straight out that I believe my mother may once have been engaged to someone who lived in his house. But he’s even younger than I am; he started Oxford after I left Michigan. He wouldn’t have been born when Father brought my British war-bride mother to the States. And he’s Graham Wyndham V, which makes the Martin on the marriage license an uncle at best. He’d think me an absolute fool to imagine he might know anything about a woman his uncle didn’t marry years before he was born.

  —You might have asked him about your mother at the start, Allison, Bea says. For all you know, he might have old man Wyndham locked in his tower.

  Heavens to Betsy, you could imagine Graham being a lock-them-in-the-tower type, couldn’t you? Although one imagines the person locked up there would be some woman. What is it about handsome men that makes them seem so untrustworthy? Or is that just me?

  It is very odd to see an owl with hands, but how could he play on the guitar without them?

  —BEATRIX POTTER, IN A MARCH 6, 1897, LETTER TO HER COUSIN MOLLY GADDUM

  THE LIGHT WAS REDDENING, THE QUIET OF THE EVENING COMING UP AS Anna Page set off toward the woods that second evening, alone. She did remember Graham’s lecture about weather and maps and emergency kits, but the sky was clear, and she needed a moment to herself. She wouldn’t get lost walking along the dry stone wall. “Dry” because the stone was stacked without any binding. “Some are old, but most date only from the enclosure movement starting after the medieval period,” Graham had said, as if that weren’t old.

  Old is relative, she thought as she passed through the break in the wall she’d missed earlier, the path to Graham’s estate. She stuck a hand in her pocket and wrapped her fingers around the puzzle box she’d nicked from his silver collection. Old is relative. She was decades older than her daddy had been when he’d introduced her to the other Kath, who had seemed so old.

  She must have been eleven or twelve then—that Saturday they’d stopped at the hospital to check on his patients on their way to the Stanford-Cal football game, just Anna Page and her daddy. Except they bumped into another doctor on the way out of the hospital—Dr. Johnson, her father said, but he called her Catherine. Then Anna Page’s father was telling Catherine she should sit with them, they had four tickets and were only using two. It hadn’t struck Anna Page as odd that they had four tickets—her sister and brother usually got to come to the games—but she did have some inkling that something wasn’t right. Perhaps she had some idea, too, that her father wasn’t living at home by then, that despite his sitting with them at the dinner table as often as any busy heart surgeon might, and reading the newspaper every Sunday morning at the breakfast table, he had not slept in her mother’s bed for over a year.

  When Catherine said she bet Anna Page would be an even better surgeon than her daddy when she grew up, Anna Page insisted she meant to be a stewardess so she could go everywhere. Catherine smiled indulgently. “You’re not going to spend your life pouring Scotch for old fools like your father, now, are you?” she said. “If you want to go wherever you want to go, Anna Page, you go to medical school.”

  Anna Page looked right at Catherine the way she always has been able to look right at a person. “You best be like the old lady who fell off the wagon,” she said in her best imitation of her mother’s accent, which she could deliver even then, “ ’cause you don’t know a dang thing about my daddy or me.”

  “Anna Page! You apologize to Dr. Johnson right this minute,” her father said. Then to Catherine—to the other Kath—“I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

  Catherine touched his arm and said, “She’s fine. She’s lovely, Lee.” She laughed and said, “She’s just like you.”

  Anna Page’s daddy turned to watch the kickoff, and Anna Page never did apologize. To this day, she can’t say what bothered her more: that her daddy had insisted she do so, or that when Catherine waved him off, he let it go.

  “Next time,” her daddy said, “I’m going to bring Little Lee and Lacy and leave you two behind. Lordy, you’ll be conspiring together against me before I know it, my two sassy girls.” Leaving Anna Page wanting to say, She’s not your girl, Daddy. I’m your only girl. That was what her daddy used to call her before her sister was born: his only girl. She couldn’t do anything about her sister except eventually stop speaking to her (although it was Lacy who’d stopped speaking to Anna Page, and Lacy can start an argument in an empty house). But on that afternoon when she met this Dr. Johnson who would turn out to be the other Kath, she was not about to conspire with her, or even be polite. “I’m going to be a stewardess,” she insisted, “and go anywhere I want.”

  Now her office is like her father’s but more chaotic: dog-eared and torn medical journals crowd the bookshelves and desk, the visitors’ chairs, spilling onto the floor as she makes room for people to sit. It’s part of her armor against the many times she was assumed to be a nurse, or squeamish, or lacking in dedication. She was asked once during an interview for a pediatric transplant fellowship how she would operate when she was pregnant, and although she meant to remain childless, she answered, “My reach to the operating table will still be shorter than yours must be to accommodate that gut, sir.” Anna Page’s armor doesn’t always protect her, but she never does take it off.

  “I love surgery for the same reason I loved to row in college, for the excuse to avoid the dreaded early-morning trifecta of coffee, croissants, and conversation,” she likes to say to the Wednesday Daughters, if not to our moms. She does engage in the morning—it’s hard to imagine a more intense engagement than having someone’s heart literally in your hands. But it’s always someone else’s heart she’s holding, someone else she means to save.

  You can’t say that to Anna Page, though. It only gets you a tirade about how half of all marriages end in expensive legal fees and devastated children, in women who give up their dreams for the sake of families only to realize their hands are empty, all the hearts they’ve been tending are racing away. Or it gets you a lecture on how exciting it is to hold an actual heart in your hands, to feel it firm and soft at the same time. “Even Catherine says I’m as good as Daddy technically, and better in other ways,” she will tell you if you give her the opening to brag. Which is, I suppose, how Anna Page ended up being a heart surgeon. For all the protesting she did as a girl about meaning to be something else, for the number of majors she went through on her way to chemistry, she always was good at the sciences, and good with people as well. That’s the best part of her, the Anna Page behind the façade of not appearing to care who secretly weeps alone at home after her long days in the OR, even when her patients have survived.

  Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe Anna Page is more like me than I imagine. Her favorite place always has been right at her daddy’s side despite the fact that she doesn’t always know it, or admit it, or want it to be. And Uncle Lee is proud of Anna Page, never mind that he doesn’t tell her he is. It’s a complicated thing for a man like him to see anyone surpass him at the only thing he’s ever really loved. It’s complicated, too, for a daughter like Anna Page, who thinks being good at something and loving it are the same thing, who has seen how bad her father is at loving and how good he is at surgery, and decided that’s a better choice than being like her mother: steadfast at loving but with nobody’s heart left to hold.

  That night in the Claife Heights woods, Anna Page, pausing to consider the way she ought to go, stared up at a fat old tree, one half of its split trunk shooting straight overhead where it might fall of its own weight and block the path, the other angling away, then bending straight upward, the arched wood contorted and unnatural. The light was lower than she’d realized.

  She turned to retrace her steps, thinking
how old she’d thought Catherine was and yet how young even her parents had been when her daddy took up with the other Kath. Why had her mother spent all those years holding on to something that never was? Was that motherhood? Sacrificing your own happiness for the illusion of a normal home?

  The stone wall she’d followed uphill was nowhere in sight, and the path before her forked where she could see it wouldn’t have seemed to from the other direction. She’d have had to look back to the left to see the merging path. Or to the right? One of those funny path drains slanted away at her feet beyond the split on one side. She’d stepped over a drain, but was it here? She took the other path, then looked back at the tree with the funny curving split, trying to remember whether this was the angle from which she’d first seen it.

  She started paying attention then. The light was fading fast, the air thick with the smell of dead leaves and moss and wood. The quiet of her feet on the soggy leaves and the slippery stone met the occasional scamper of a red squirrel, or a deer, perhaps. Wild boar used to inhabit these woods, Graham had said, but no longer did. Of course, cougars didn’t patrol the streets of Palo Alto, and yet one ended up in a tree on Walnut Drive. The poor creature hadn’t done a thing to anyone, but he’d been shot dead.

  Anna Page came to another fork, both paths leading downhill, which should be toward the lake. She took the wider one, thinking surely the path she’d come up hadn’t narrowed as much as the other. When she came to a third fork, both paths heading uphill, she knew she’d taken the wrong turn at the funny tree. And it was getting dark so quickly.

  She was making her way on the slippery rock path, reconsidering this direction, when she heard something. Where her footfalls would have landed, she could just make out a long stretch of what might be wavy gray-red diamond. She backed away slowly, trying to calm the rush of blood through her pulmonary artery, where she might bleed to death in a very few heartbeats were it ever compromised. When she thought she was far enough, she turned to run, only to see a shadow of a figure ahead.

  From the Journals of Ally Tantry

  10.11.2009, Thwaite Howe Inn, Ambleside. Bea is right! I don’t exactly draw at her level, but I can draw. Graham has converted an old greenhouse on his estate into a studio, where Bea says even her old eyes might paint again. She insists she won’t, that she only finished as many books as she did because the Warnes needed her to. She hadn’t published a book in four years when Harold Warne was caught passing bad money—twenty thousand pounds!—all to save a fishing business which nearly took the publishing house down with it.

  —Poor Fruing was walking with Harold in Covent Garden when the police came right up to them and arrested Harold, she says. Harold was sentenced to eighteen months of hard labor at Wormwood Scrubs, and Fruing was left to try to save the business, with me as its biggest creditor.

  I glance up to see a sail snapping on Lake Windermere, a thing I might draw someday.

  —He wanted to save the family reputation, but one can’t hold very well to one’s reputation with a forger in the family, Bea says. It made me cranky to have to produce books under those conditions, yet I couldn’t let the firm go under, I couldn’t let that be the legacy of my Mr. Norman Warne’s life. I was so very fond, too, of his mother and Millie. But Fruing would have me writing those d … d little books when I am dead and buried.

  —But you are dead and buried, Bea, I remind her.

  —I am utterly tired of them, and my eyes are wearing out, she says.

  It occurs to me for the first time that even the animal characters in her books don’t have idyllic lives. Ginger and Pickles close their store for want of profits. Peter ends up sick and in bed, having narrowly escaped becoming rabbit pie. Poor Jemima never does hatch her eggs.

  —Remind me what a “thwaite” is, I say. And a “howe.”

  —A thwaite, dear Allison, is a clearing—land cleared for planting. And a howe is a valley. Her tone a bit miffed. She does prefer to be the center of attention.

  —So this inn at the edge of the lake where there is no valley is named “Clearing in the Valley Inn”?

  —Do I look like I am the owner and could change that?

  —I thought you owned everything here, Bea.

  —Yes, well, don’t remind anyone of that, or they will call the whole Lake District “Potter’s Corner” simply to attract you tacky Americans. I do take umbrage at being called tacky.

  —You aren’t as tacky as most Americans, Bea concedes. And there was that lovely Marian Perry who came to visit me from … was it Boston? But you do vote.

  As a young woman, Bea had presented a scientific paper on her beloved mushrooms that, although dismissed at the time, turned out to be important. She wrote books so she could be financially independent, and became famous in her own right as a result. After she’d made a success with writing, she went on to be the queen of Lake District sheep. And yet there is no convincing her on the value of suffrage. It’s such an incongruity. Perhaps defying her family and her rank in society with her writing left her feeling the need to conform in other ways. Perhaps falling in love with men who were considered beneath her left her wanting to give them some authority over her that would save them from feeling inferior.

  —Is that why you never wanted to publish your children’s books, Allison?

  —Is what why I never wanted to publish?

  —Because you didn’t want Jim to feel inferior.

  —Of course not! Whatever gave you that idea? Jim isn’t inferior to me.

  —Nor was Mr. Heelis to me, Allison. Nor Kevin to your Hope, even though her salary is quadruple his. But the truth and what people think is truth don’t always match.

  When I stop to think about it, I remember when the Wednesday Sisters first learned Jim was Indian. “But you’re such a pretty girl,” Kath had said, as if nobody in her right mind would marry a man of color if she had any choice. I remember the first time I took Hope to the park, that nasty woman assuming Hope wasn’t my natural child because of her skin color, asking why I hadn’t adopted a baby who was white.

  —Bea, do you think Hope would be happier if she married someone who was mixed? I ask.

  —What do you think, Allison?

  —I think Kevin adores her.

  —But doesn’t Jim adore you? And yet your heart goes all slippy-sloppy when Mr. Wyndham takes your hand to show you that you can draw.

  —It wasn’t like that, I protest.

  —Wasn’t it? Then do tell me, what was it like?

  The water is utterly still, the quiet disconcerting.

  —I don’t know, I say.

  —But you do, Allison. Look more closely. It isn’t adoration that you need, is it? And Hope is very like you.

  Later: I’m comfortably settled in bed at this charming inn when Bea says,

  —When my mother refused to capitalize my allowance, I used to rant about what a fool she was letting all her money go to the supertax or the death duty when she might allow it to come to me. But I didn’t need money. I don’t suppose one ever becomes emotionally free of one’s parents, does one?

  —I don’t know, I say.

  —My brother might never have told our parents he’d married Mary Scott if I hadn’t met Mr. Heelis. It emerged in a burst of frustration when they tried to enlist him to persuade me that marrying a country solicitor was beneath me. I imagine Bertram felt the guilt of not having supported me when I was engaged to Mr. Warne, because he chose that moment to tell them he’d been secretly married for eleven years.

  —Eleven years!

  —Even then he claimed his wife was a farmer’s daughter, which was no great claim in their opinion but was less horrifying than the truth. She was the daughter of a wine merchant!

  I listen to the lake lap at the boats and the shore in the darkness beyond the window, thinking of my sister. She moved to California after college because I was there, yet she never broke ties with Mother and Father. Perhaps she’d urged them to reconsider, to see me again, or perhap
s she hadn’t. If she did, it had no effect.

  —I do think the opposition only made Mr. Heelis and me fonder of each other, Bea says. We were married in a quiet little ceremony at St. Mary Abbots—too fancy for us, but at least it was done and we could collect our new bull and go home.

  I click on the bedside light, a sadness creeping in at the memory of Jim and me saying our vows in front of a justice of the peace, without a single friend standing by. Why hadn’t we included friends?

  —Your new bull, Bea? I ask.

  —A lovely white bull we collected at the Windermere train station, on our way back with wedding cake for our neighbors up and down the Kendal Road.

  —A bull.

  —I don’t think I ever forgave my mother for denying me the love I wanted. I suppose we share that, you and I.

  When I don’t respond, she says,

  —You ought to have told Graham of your mother’s connection to Ainsley’s End from the start, Allison. But perhaps at this point you will let it go?

  —Let what go, Bea?

  —The anger at your mother.

  —I’m not angry. How can I be angry at a dead woman?

  Bea assures me she’s right beside me. I needn’t raise my voice.

  —Your mother forgave you, I say. My mother never did. Hope and Sammy never knew their grandmother or their grandfather because my mother never forgave me for marrying Jim.

  —But Allison, Bea says, it isn’t our mothers who need to do the forgiving.

  Nutkin made a whirring noise to sound like the wind, and he took a running jump right onto the head of Old Brown! … Then all at once there was a flutterment and a scufflement and a loud “Squeak!”… Nutkin was in his waist-coat pocket! This looks like the end of the story; but it isn’t.

  —FROM The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin BY BEATRIX POTTER