“Great” will bother Alice, who will not bear to have Samuel’s attention turn to another woman, and Mary, too, who will assume that Samuel is mocking her. “Scattering”—Edwin shuts his eyes against the commentary that will produce. Likely for their entire stay in New York.
Everything in him tenses as he looks from Samuel to Mary. He had known when Samuel sat back in his chair. He knows that posture. The way Samuel settles into his own frame. Impervious to the world. A powerful will in him. And in Edwin, a parallel stiffening that is not power but a kind of primitive terror. As if Samuel could make his heart stop, could bring life as he tries to live it lurching to a halt. He tries to unspool the last minutes, to Samuel’s first settling into his great wing chair, to the lift of his brow. Brother provocateur. He tries to loosen Samuel’s hold on them all. What Samuel said was not so terrible, surely. In fact, wasn’t it kind for him to have called Mary’s intelligence great. Great.
So this is what Samuel makes of this buttoned-up woman, the neck of her crisp shirtwaist holding her head aloft. These women with their books and degrees and sensible clothes. Alice hadn’t thought of intelligence as any explanation for Mary’s quiet. She didn’t think she had gone to college. But Alice has become accustomed to the generous strokes with which Samuel paints the magnificence of others (qualities invisible to her, and others, too, she suspects): the banker with his passion for botany, that boring gentleman who did not get up from the armchair for the whole of the Stanfords’ party (“But how splendidly happy he keeps his wife”). Samuel had only to come up to her, nod in the direction of the woman wearing the dull red dress, and whisper, “Poet,” to entirely transform the woman sheathed in that unfortunate color. Alice expects this of Samuel, that he will say something enlarging, something that makes this or that ordinary person fascinating—in fact, she harbors a secret shame that she does not so transform the world for him, that she does not see beyond surfaces as he does, that once he is beyond the thrall of their physical love, she too will fall prey to his incisive remarks, only in her case, since all of her best is lovely and obvious and not a secret to anyone, he will one day whisper of her in another woman’s ear, “So ample a bosom, so small a heart.” She seeks to postpone that day, to broaden her interests, to become a woman Samuel might truly love before he notices that she is not, and so she rearranges herself for him, offering a fuller view, a sweeter smile, a squeeze of her hand. But he is not looking at her. Intelligent! Seldom does Samuel acknowledge that of others.
“Am I to be flattered?” Mary asks.
Edwin raises a hand and lowers it. He smiles nervously, a silent apology for the gaze with which his wife affixes Samuel, for the awkwardness that has swooped down from the rafters, as if from nowhere. Go no further, Mary’s eyes say. She is a hawk, surveying the field, arresting time as wings hold gravity at bay. The discomfort of this moment goes on and on, a silence hovering, beating its wings over the brothers and Alice, beating, beating, thudding from each a quietly rising alert.
“Scattering?” Mary draws out the sounds, as if each syllable is so worthy of disdain that the uttering of the word entire is an affront beyond the reach of the most liberal imagination. “Exactly what do you propose by that?”
“Come, now. You and I—we’re not like Edwin. It’s hard for us to stick to one thing. Admit—you’ve said it yourself—when you look back at your gardening notebooks, some seasons it appears that every crop has died. Did your garden truly fail? Never. Nature keeps busy even as we lapse. You just stopped writing. Perhaps an interesting houseguest arrived.” Samuel raises a hand and brow both to that possibility, and fixes Mary with a stare as intent as her own. “Or some other project. You start; you stop. Your concentration leaves. But when everything converges, ah—”
“Leave it, Samuel,” Edwin says.
And now it is Edwin’s warning that Alice does not like. In Samuel’s family, she has no place. She forces a smile again, at her own table a foreigner, ever congenial in recompense for not understanding a single word.
“What? She’s said it herself, Eddie. I meant no harm. I love her enthusiasms. Don’t misunderstand. The Anti-Imperialist League. The notebooks. The library lecture series—I wouldn’t have her any other way.”
“Not any way,” mouths Edwin.
“Are you suggesting”—Mary raises her voice—“that you and I scatter our seeds too widely?”
With that, Samuel stops in midrise and sits back down, his eyes on her. Then he turns deliberately toward Alice, who relaxes a bit to have him back, except that she fears her chest is flushed. She cannot look down to check because she does not wish to look away from him; she takes care not to blink, hoping her own unbroken gaze can pull him from his brother and sister-in-law. I am the one who loves you, she wills him to see. Though perhaps it had been foolish of her to wear such a dress. Next to the sober Mary, she feels silly. But then, she has neither manufactured nor lost a child.
“This sister of mine—I may call you that, Mary?”—Samuel pauses barely long enough for Mary to wave her hand in agreement or dismissal, it matters not what she thinks, he will not stop now—“has long charmed everyone on both sides of the river. The Deerfield, that is, not the Mississippi, though I dare say if she’d traveled West, she’d have had her share of admirers there, too.”
“Samuel, hush.”
She doesn’t mean hush at all, Alice thinks. She means say more, but discreetly. No need to drag the West into it. Keep the references local and polite.
“It’s true. This brother of mine plucked himself quite a woman.”
“Speaking of which,” says Edwin, “we haven’t properly congratulated you. The both of you.”
“Well, well. Are you ready now for me to stand with my bride for your blessing?”
“Samuel, you know I’m not much for ceremony.”
“I do know.”
“Forgive me that, Alice. We would have liked to come—but the weather was so bad, and—” Edwin’s voice falters as he searches his memory for what had two years earlier made the trip they had now completed appear impossible. The hard frost that May, the portraits to be finished. “We can see how happy you are together. How lucky for you both. Please—accept our congratulations.”
Alaska. He had meant then to go to Alaska. He had been selling off his stock of frames, his picture cart. That was it.
Alice inclines her head, a flush of gratitude creeping over her. He is kind, this brother. She finds her eyes wet. Is it kindness that makes her cry? Kindness a pocket she wishes to huddle inside, burying her face, hibernating all the long winter. But she is the hostess; she is the wife of Samuel Elmer. She blinks hard, that her lashes might dry her tears, and raises her head again to face the family.
Tuesday
In her green book, Mary could tell the story herself, but for now she is only a woman walking. There is always a woman. And a man. Treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. These lines of Emerson’s come to her. A kind of curse, she thinks, to move through the world with so many words strung together. She could spend a lifetime unraveling and tying on a warp of another’s scraps, never to arrive at her own weaving. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Emerson again. Indeed: Why not?
Samuel was right. He is right about her always.
He exposes her. Her pretense that she belongs on First Avenue, that
