The next Sunday she’d accompanied Bruce and his vanload to the vigil, driving past charred blocks and looted storefronts. Then, two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed. All year violence had continued and escalated.
Her husband’s cousin Sylvia joined them on the porch. “Do something about that boy. That’s no way to behave in Meeting.”
“He’s young,” Dorothy began, but bit back the defense. Sylvia sat on the Meeting’s Finance Committee. “I’ll speak with him.”
Dorothy and Grayson started home through the cemetery. Most of those buried beneath mossy stones were his kin; she’d lie here one day, too, beside him. He opened the gate to the path through the fields. Runaway slaves had hidden here among the corn stalks, helped along their way to Canada on the underground railway by his grandparents. Sometimes, now, young men came to stay with members of the Meeting on their way to Canada, seeking a different freedom. Last year the Peace Pilgrim had appeared at Meeting one Sunday. The elderly woman had been walking back and forth across the country for fifteen years, since Korea, carrying out her vow to remain a wanderer until there was peace in the world. She stayed the night with them. After she left, Grayson had said she was engaged in a pointless exercise.
At the spring from which the Meeting took its name, two students were necking on the bench beneath the trees. Grayson chuckled. “It’s not funny,” Dorothy hissed. Students lolled against each other everywhere, it seemed. On campus she had to keep the music practice rooms locked or they were used for other kinds of practice.
“You know the rules about public display of affection,” she called out in her sternest dean’s voice.
“It wasn’t public till you got here,” the boy said, standing up and shaking back his long hair. It was Todd. He’d ignored her dress code; velvet bell-bottoms dipped beneath his jutting hipbones. Bright but a lazy student, he was especially popular with the girls. It was just a matter of time until she caught him with pot, too. His father, a real estate developer, was always proposing a “significant gift.” The school had yet to receive a check or stock certificates. Was it a promise or blackmail?
The girl was Miriam Street. Dark hair and dark eyes, she looked like a gypsy in her long skirt made from an Indian bedspread. Her blouse was a skin-tight purple leotard, no bra. Dorothy would have to add underwear to the dress code; it seemed that nothing could be left to common sense or modesty.
Miriam was the child of another old Clear Spring family. Her mother, Garnet, had died that year. Garnet had been the first to befriend Dorothy when she moved from Philadelphia to marry Grayson. Soon the two women had been pregnant together, but Dorothy miscarried. She’d never conceived again; the friendship languished. Years later when Garnet became ill, Dorothy felt guilty, as though her envy of Garnet’s healthy child had caused the cancer.
Miriam’s father, Gil, a physicist, had recently lost his job with the Department of Energy over his participation in a vigil against biological weapons. Sometimes the price for bearing witness was too high. Since losing his wife and his job, Gil had been drinking and neglecting his daughter. Dorothy had convinced him to let Miriam come live on dorm, belatedly trying to make amends to the girl’s deceased mother.
“I’ll expect you both for Stewardship tomorrow,” she said to Todd and Miriam. Students were assigned extra chores as meaningful punishment. Sweat equity, Grayson called it.
The boy smirked and grabbed Miriam’s hand, lacing their fingers together. Dorothy itched to yank them apart. Insolent students infuriated her. Maybe it was just as well she’d never been a parent; at least she could leave the students and go home at night.
“It’s time the two of you were heading back. We’ll walk with you,” said Grayson.
No one spoke as they tramped in double file, older couple behind the younger one, through the woods. They arrived at the rail fence where the school property began.
“Come have a bite with us, Miriam,” said Dorothy. She’d rescue her from the predatory boy.
“Thanks, but I’ll just go on back to the dining hall.”
“I’ll call the dorm, excuse you from lunch.” The invitation had become an order.
“See you,” said the boy, climbing over the fence instead of opening the gate.
The couple, Miriam in tow, crossed the road. The sign beside their mailbox read Grayson Shaw, Cabinetmaker and Luthier.
“What’s a luthier?” asked the girl.
“Maker of stringed instruments,” said Dorothy.
Grayson had been a woodworker before he started the school. Former customers still called, but there was no time for cabinetry. “Running a school is like running with a wild woman,” he sometimes joked. He found time for his dulcimers only late in the day or at night. It was as necessary as breathing for him to be doing something with his hands.
Clear Spring’s original music teacher, a young woman from South Carolina, had introduced the school to the lap dulcimer and inspired Grayson to try making one. “Can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” he said but attacked the project with enthusiasm and an engineer’s precision. He gave that first instrument to the teacher and she praised his gift for finding the voice in wood.
One morning Dorothy discovered an anonymous note in her mailbox in the faculty room. Keep an eye on your husband the music lover. She’d started to tear it up, but then tucked it beneath the blotter on her desk. At the end of the day, she passed it to Grayson across the supper table.
He read, rubbing his crew-cut hair. “Oh, for pity’s sake. It’s dulcimers I’m interested in, not that skinny little teacher.”
Dorothy had looked around at faculty meetings. Who wrote the note? The music teacher left after just one year. Whatever else was true about what had happened, it was lonely at the school for a single woman.
The summer after, Dorothy and Grayson went dancing every weekend at the amusement park in Glen Echo. The prescribed steps, the physical closeness, eased the lingering wariness she’d felt. On the drive home she would rest her hand in Grayson’s lap and sometimes they would end the evening making love. They won the waltz competition at the end of the summer, dancing with a sheet of paper pressed between them, paper pressed thin as the remaining shadow of her doubt. Grayson installed a wall of mirrors in his workshop, making it their private dance hall. They didn’t use it now; after dinner most evenings there were meetings, student emergencies, paperwork, bills. But he still played the dance records when he worked on his dulcimers. Yesterday evening she’d come to the workshop to say good night and found him listening to a waltz as he stroked tung oil on the dulcimer with his softest brush (special ordered, made from the ear hair of Asian oxen). She’d thought for a moment of inviting him to dance, but it was too late, and it had been so long since they had been partners in that way. Grayson was right; the school was ravenous and absorbing. Not like a wild woman, but a demanding tribe of needy children. It was funny, that their shared work sometimes drew them together and other times pushed them apart. Perhaps parenting would have been like that, too.
“Show Miriam the dulcimer,” Dorothy said now.
The workshop was fragrant with sawdust and varnish, Grayson’s scents. Almost finished, the instrument lay gleaming on the bench. He used black walnut for the backs of his dulcimers, and spruce or red cedar for the tops, taking care to pair the slices of wood in book-matched sets, twin grains side by side, like open pages of a book. On this one, the top was red cedar. She thought spruce was prettier, but Grayson preferred
