wondered what it was that had kept them both from crossing the road late at night. Neither of them ever lacked things to say. Perhaps for him it was no comfort to hear the noises of his brother’s house. At least not the same sweetness it was for her to know he was there. When he left for good and took Maud with him, she decided that he must not have known of her presence, must never have thought of the nighttime noises as a kind of conversation between them, because otherwise he would not have kept the lamp lit all those nights later on—he could not have meant for her to see him with Nellie like that.
With a woman, he is in his element. She and Edwin should not have been surprised or hurt when he announced that he was moving away. Alma still walked at night there. Edwin said as much. Mary, too, had started out the door and stood, looking across the road and down the hill, realizing she’d come out to tell Alma something. Then she would have to recite the facts: Alma with her cloud of black hair will not walk down these steps again, nor open the door to the porch, nor yell Cocorico, the French rooster’s dinner call. She will not answer any call; she will not sneak in the back door and sit at the kitchen table until someone finds her. Still, when she heard Samuel’s chair creaking late at night, it seemed to Mary as if Alma’s chair moved beside it.
Who inhabited that darkness? In the night, even after Samuel had finally moved away, she liked to stand on the porch listening. Sometimes Nellie left late after tending to Ma Whiting. The world was not small, then.
When we think of someone, Mary wonders, don’t they know, wherever they are, whatever far realm is theirs? Aren’t the ones we love with us always—Jimmy Roberts, she blushes to think, and looks at Edwin. He brushes something from his boot. She turns away before he catches her eye, and looks back at Samuel. Did he think of Nellie? Of her baby? Instead of Gracie, it is Effie whom Mary sees: a small girl with long brown curls leaning over the basket to admire the sleeping baby. You fit in there once, Mary must have told her. For an instant, Mary sees Effie, looking up from the basket in inquiry, turning from Gracie to her. And then she is gone. Mary cannot imagine her anymore. Only her brown eyes (always they were darkness, even the night she was born, when Mary looked into them and saw the question, Why did you bring me here?)
Though Mary’s faith goes so far as to say, The dead are always with us, she is puzzled by her belief. They come down the same staircases and speak in the same mortal voices. But out of time. And if out of time— where? Effie by now or by yesterday grown and aged and born again. The plump sturdiness of a girl about to become woman, unbounded.
Mary watches Alice laugh and Samuel touch her bottom lip—she sees that Alice cannot keep her eyes from him and Samuel’s own crinkle with delight—and she feels old, older than she should be, old enough to be his mother and Edwin’s both. Well: Hadn’t she known them both always? At least since the War’s end.
Alice watches Samuel as he shifts and stretches his arms back behind his head: He looks happy, she supposes, and yet is not content herself with that description. Something is different about him tonight. A flavor she’s not tasted—something foreign to their lives together. At least Maud is not here to see. Impossible, that would be. Alice could not have stood all of the Elmer family together at once—Samuel’s daughter, brother, sister-in-law, all talking about a life she would never know, no matter how long she and Samuel live together. Certainly they would have taken pity on her and narrated the necessary scenes. But without Maud to shift the balance irrevocably toward the past—Why not call it that? It was over and done, wouldn’t they see?—they had slipped into the comfortable conventions of civility reserved for dining couples of little intimacy but circumstantial favor: The husband had grown up with Samuel; the wife had been sent an introduction by neighbors. This, Alice could well manage.
“Excuse me.”
Samuel’s words startle Alice, though she had been waiting for him to speak. But she had thought that he would say something to her. Not this half-swallowed apology directed toward—whom? She had thought he would signal her—fold up his napkin and drop it on his plate, touch her sleeve—before embarking on the evening’s summation, before suggesting easily, but without commitment, future plans. They might take a ride in the park together. He would see about introducing Edwin to Sinclair, who wished to add to his fine collection of paintings.
“Not at all,” Mary answers, withdrawing her feet from under the table and shifting her chair back.
His feet touched Mary’s, Alice thinks. Bony Mary. See that she doesn’t break.
“I’ll make some room over here—” Samuel hauls his feet out from under the cloth and starts to put them right up on the table with the china plates. “Oh-oh,” he laughs, pulling them back just before his heels make a smear of the potatoes. He makes a show of how civilized a clown he is. A thoroughly citified man joking about the country boy he still is at heart.
Mary waves a hand, dismissing Samuel.
Like a mother, thinks Alice. Like a mother clucking disapprovingly over the antics of her beloved son, all the while aglow with the very fact of his existence, that central amazement that cannot be diminished, no matter how bad his behavior.
“Samuel, stop.” Alice slaps his thigh. “Now—” She hesitates before suggesting that the men retire to Samuel’s study, and in her hesitation, Samuel goes over to the sideboard, takes a bottle from ice, and pulls the cork. She claps her hands together in pleasure.
Slipping the stems of the champagne flutes between the fingers of one hand, he shows off: how beautiful and large his hands, that he can hold the glasses so, barely clinking. The glasses are made insubstantial in his hand, the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun, she knows not which. She watches and thinks, Here is happiness, as he pours from high above each glass a precise cascade of the cold wine.
She sees Edwin and Mary exchange a look: This is what they do; very well, this once.
Yes, Alice silently adds. Let them see us as we are.
When Samuel finishes pouring, he sits back comfortably.
He should say something now. He should welcome her to the family, Mary and Edwin to the city. But Samuel acts as though nothing deserves comment, not the fact of their first dinner all together, not having poured champagne—this just another moment in the series of moments that make a dinner or a lifetime. They look into their glasses and concentrate on sipping the champagne, embarrassed for him, Alice thinks, embarrassed that he has not seen the requirements of the moment he himself created. No one asked him to do it!
He sits back in his chair, as comfortable as if he’d been born to it.
“Ah, Mary. How I will enjoy watching this city of ours come out refracted through your great”—he reaches out with his hand, as if it is from the air that he must pluck the proper words—“scattering intelligence.”
Edwin feels everything in him pitch forward. Leave it to Samuel. Leave it to Samuel to deliver the moment for which they had all been waiting, without even knowing it (thus his success in business). He says something unexpected. All evening, all four of them, too timid to move beyond the most circumscribed of territories, as if each had been told the other three were invalids and so dutifully followed doctor’s instructions not to startle the patients. They must be protected from chills, from sudden movements, from shocks. Which of them hadn’t known the parameters of each answer before the question asked? And so arranged a look of interest that was not itself interest but falsely elaborated patience. How can he hope to produce paintings of any worth in these circumstances. “Your trip was good, I trust?” “You are settling in on 23rd Street?” Leave it to Samuel to blow that all up. Goading Mary.
Damn him, Edwin thinks. His provocation is deliberate. In one sentence—harmless
