ahead. It’s the ruby shellac,” he said. “Like rouge on a face.”
Miriam traced the heart-shaped sound hole. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
“Let me show you what’s inside.” He always inscribed a fragment of verse in each instrument, beneath the sound hole. The poem had to be brief, the letters tiny, to fit. “You can read it if the light shines in just right,” he said, holding the dulcimer up. “Can you make it out?”
The girl and the man stood side by side.
“The little rift within the lute by and by will make the music mute,” the girl read.
Tennyson. Was he alluding to the intervals of distance between them? There was an intermittent, insidious fissure, a rip that had first opened years ago, after the failed pregnancy. For a long time afterward, making love seemed a dangerous obligation, freighted with the longing and the fear of conceiving again, which never happened. Eventually, she’d come to terms with being barren, her regret mitigated by taking care of him, and then of students. She’d comforted herself with the realization that there was at least sometimes a special closeness possible for childless couples.
The music teacher had ripped open the seam between them again. Though the ambiguous incident became woven into the warp and woof of the years, it left a flaw in the fabric. Recently, it had been his turn to be angry when she insisted that he stay on at the school. But over any long marriage, there were bound to be periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium, seasons of warm and cold.
“Why’s it called a dulcimer?” asked Miriam.
“Latin,” said Dorothy. “Dulce means sweet. Like the sound it makes. There’s one in the house you can try. Please come help me with lunch.”
“Give a shout when you’re ready,” said Grayson.
Autumn sunlight reflected off the kitchen’s heart of pine floors. She kept the windows bare to see the trees in the orchard. But now the school had put the valuable land up for sale; it would be bulldozed for a housing development. She’d made her last batch of applesauce and stored it on the shelves Grayson had built for her in the cellar.
“You can set the table,” said Dorothy. “Silverware is in the drawer of the sideboard in the dining room.”
She telephoned the dorm advisor, one of their best young faculty, one they might lose next year to the higher salary of public school. “Miriam’s having lunch with us,” she explained. She arranged cold fried chicken from the evening before on a Blue Willow platter and poured applesauce into a pressed glass bowl.
“Which dishes should I use?” asked Miriam.
“The ones with the yellow flowers.” The dishes had been part of her trousseau. Use pretty things or you’re in bondage to them, her mother had said.
Miriam had seconds of everything: applesauce, devilled eggs, chicken. “Thanks, this was delicious.”
“Thee must join us again,” Grayson said.
Dorothy was startled. He rarely used the old Quaker form of address, except sometimes with her. It did feel right, having Miriam there. Without her, Dorothy might have criticized what he’d said in Meeting, accused him of further endangering the school. They would have quarreled. What if Miriam were to come live with them? It would reduce the cost of her scholarship to the school, and the girl would be safer here. They’d be safer, too.
“Lend me a dishtowel,” said Grayson after lunch. Linen was best for rubbing in the final coat of carnauba wax. “And one of your nail files.” Nothing better, he’d told her once, for getting around the curves on the body of the instrument. He left for the shop.
“Here’s an apron,” Dorothy said, tying her own. The apron’s strings were getting shorter; she was thickening. She felt heavy beside the slender girl. “Why don’t you wash, I’ll dry and put away. There are rubber gloves under the sink.”
Miriam plunged her bare hands into the soapy water. “I used to do the dishes with my mother. Dad lets them go till we run out.”
“Your mother was my first friend, when I moved here.”
“I miss her so much,” said Miriam.
Dorothy was tempted to reach out and embrace the girl, but held back, always mindful of the necessary boundary between herself and students. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
They worked side by side in easy silence. When the dishes were almost done, Dorothy forced herself to speak. “You must be careful, with Todd.”
“We were just kissing.”
“It’s easy for things to get out of hand.”
“It’s no big deal, really. Are you going to tell my father?”
“No, I just want you to stop and think.”
“I tried to talk to her about the boy,” Dorothy said that evening, brushing her hair. “Keep an eye on her when you’re on campus. I don’t trust him.”
“Too pretty for her own good. Just like her mother, when she was seventeen,” said Grayson from the bed. He’d grown up with Garnet. Though it was foolish, Dorothy felt something like jealousy.
She crawled into bed beside him and reached for the Meeting’s handbook, Faith and Practice. Tonight’s passage spoke to her concern about Miriam, and the climate of casual physical affection between the students. The culture was so intemperate, lascivious.
“Listen to this. Maybe you could use this book in your class. It talks about sex in such a simple, good way.”
Grayson taught Quakerism every fall, required of all new students. The course was really about his philosophy of life—how to mow a field, sand a board, how to find the Divine through work. He’d wanted to change the course this year, call it Activism. Dorothy persuaded him not to do that. But she had been encouraging him to include something about what the public schools euphemistically called Health. “The students look up to you,” she’d said. “They might listen.”
Now she read aloud. “Love is a relationship between people. The sexual encounter can be love and consecrate or it can be lust and desecrate.”
“We don’t use books in my class,” he said.
She turned out the light; they did not reach out for each other, even in the dark. It was lonely in the bed without the weight of his arm across her. Sometimes they fell asleep on their separate sides of the bed and over the course of the night rolled close, warm animals seeking familiar comfort. But she knew even before closing her eyes that would not happen tonight.
The next morning Dorothy lay in bed, puzzling over the fragments of a dream. There had been a door in the bedroom opening to a secret room in the house. Lutes and viola da gamba hung from low rafters. A half-finished harpsichord stood in the corner. Maybe it was Grayson’s dream slipping into her sleep, the way she sometimes found a stray wood chip from his hair on her pillow. He’d never made a harpsichord, never had the time. Perhaps he could, if he quit the school, took the job with the activists. If he were happier, would it set things right between them?
Later that day while taking a prospective student
