Every Past Thing. Pamela Thompson

      Unbridled Books

      Denver, Colorado

      Copyright © 2007 Pamela Thompson

      All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Thompson, Pamela

      Every past thing / Pamela Thompson.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-1-932961-39-3

      1. Wives–Fiction. 2. NewYork (N.Y.)–History–1898-1951–Fiction.

      3. Middle age–Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

      PS3620.H685E94 2007

      813’.6–dc22

      2007019499

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Book design by SH • CV

      First Printing

       for Mark

       Why should we grope about the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also.

      —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “NATURE”

       With the ones we love, we know from the start the Story’s end. Death will come to one of us, and we Three will be Two, and the Two finally One. The sun will set and rise again and after our sleep (if there be sleep) we will stir only to find that heartache knows no rest: Still it sears straight through and burns hottest along the edges of our shoulder blades. How fragile we are, there. The wings we once had have been broken, and the sky is far beyond us.

       We will not see that place again.

       I would not have seen that sunrise if I hadn’t been watching over her. It wasn’t meant for anyone human to see—its brilliance, the orange Fire of it, was not of this world. Or if it was, if it was only our own sun rising in the sky, then Life was so terrible, so Wide, so Beyond us that death itself seemed very small. More human. For how, lit by such fire, nestled in such power, could such small beings hope to survive? How long could we expect Life to stay in the delicate and precise arrangements that are our bodies?

       Every rise and every fall of her chest I watched. I unfolded and refolded a damp cloth to press to her brow. And I watched her skin for Signs.

       What Economy created her—only two shades, cream and brown: her skin utterly pale, with no bloom or agitation or bite; her brown eyes the same golden brown as their lashes, the same as her two brows kicking up as if to touch in the center, the same as the soft long hairs loosed from her braids and sticking to my cloth. I leaned down next to her, my head to her breast, as if she were the mother and I the child. I couldn’t let her see the worry that ran shock-through me. Was there some curing touch—? She needed more air. I unbuttoned the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons down the center of her chest, fumbling, my fingers all clumsy. Why had I attached nubs the size of milk teeth, and worked button-holes smaller even than her fingertips? Why such fuss?

       When I put my ear to her heart, it was rubbing. Not beating. As if something were squeezing and muffling that muscle whose effort pushes Life through our limbs. When I heard that strange sound (which was the absence of rhythm), I knew what the Doctor would not say. That this sickness would not ease. That her words and bloom would not return. That the rubbing too would stop.

       Do not think I guessed this day would come. She had been such a healthy child! Last I knew, it was Summer and she and Maud were skipping along the road to Goodnow stream, big girls, bold, with thick braids and loud voices and enormous appetites. Or she was rolling down the hill with her father, the two of them cock-a-doodling like roosters. Their voices came to me through the kitchen window.

       But that morning, in the presence of the terrible orange light, no voices came. All sounds below muffled. Imagined—at most. Yet they had been, once, all of my existence.

       I understood then how small my own part in this Life.

       After she died, the sky was gray and cold. I noticed this only later, in the afternoon, among people. Edwin, the Doctor, Samuel, and his Maud with her giant lily. And then I wondered, Was that Fire her leaving? Or had the Fear inside me dreamed such a Sun? I left the parlor and went outside and stared up at the sky. The empty gray expanse that Fire’s diffusion. How was I to believe a winter sky so dull contained all that light?

       I knew then something about people and their quiet. How little we know of anyone. Each of us with our skin covering and fixing us in place, and our eyes, carrying us by. Our small lives and—such brilliant light.

       “Come, Mary,” Samuel said, wrapping a dark shawl about my shoulders. “You’ll catch a chill. Come inside.” I let him lead me there, tho’ I did not see why.

      THE GREEN BOOK OF MARY JANE ELMER

      Effie Lillian Elmer, dearest. 29 June 1880–3 January 1890

      Monday

      Alice waits by the parlor windows with the heavy velvet curtains nearly closed, so she can see but not be seen. Three times she has leapt to her feet, certain she heard the carriage—Samuel had sent his own to fetch them. Three times certain and three confounded, so now the waiting has become a trial and a degradation. It demands of her a patience that makes her neck itch. Though nothing actually disturbs her neck: not hair escaping from the careful pile atop her head, not her dress, which plunges low in front and back, symmetrical but for the body’s asymmetry, and all silk: Why not, luck provided?

      It was luck, she grants, luck and not anything else that brought her to these comfortable surroundings, husband upstairs and dinner waiting in the kitchen and orange silk wrapped snug about her and then flowing to the floor. With every reason not to itch, she itches. (Though vanity prevents the indulgence of scratching. Her chest must not be scrawled over with pink gashes.)

      How can she be expected to make a good impression on his family, she wants to ask Samuel. Dinner cold an hour ago. But he does not leave his study.

      She

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