fabric she has brought out to match in a shop on Rivington, and not a book, whose pages, were she to fill them, would tell—that, she is not prepared to say.
So far she has spent her days in New York walking (and making whip-snaps, of course; they’d brought the machine with them; they needed some income; they could not let Samuel provide all), from east to west and back until she had lost track of logic amid the crooked streets of lower Manhattan. She sees with certainty now how impossible her task. Even if she were to walk every street of Manhattan, doing so would not yield up every resident. Anyone who didn’t wish to be found would stay hidden. And to be honest, some small relief she feels in that. She may just as well stop looking, lean back into the plump, goose-down pillow of Chance. Goosey goosey gander, where shall I wander? she mocks herself. Chance at least something she believes in. Accept whatsoever befalls. Emerson.
But she cannot—quite.
It was as if Samuel had been looking in her window as she’d packed and not only had seen how she’d wrapped the green book in her nightgown and tucked it at the bottom of her bag but had surmised from that her every thought—and laughed. With Samuel, that danger existed. That he might dump the things he knew of her through the sieve of his mockery, and then show her—how thin the water that runs through, how ordinary the soil caught in the screen. Why indeed write in notebooks at all? Trying to extricate meaning from day, when the days were all—marching single in an endless file. She is easy prey. For him, at least.
“Still the same girl,” he had whispered to her as she and Edwin were leaving after dinner. And she—she could not say that by her experience, she should have earned more respect than he showed her. Instead she was left speechless, or rather, speechless-feeling (for hadn’t she said something?). She was the same, after all; with that she could not argue. And by that he meant the girl who’d talked with him on Sunday afternoons while his brother sketched by the window. The girl who’d talked of the Stoics, of natural history and the reproduction of worms—of anything. “Edwin acts, while you and I fritter the hours away.” She is the girl who talks with him, instead of filling any notebook. “And what, my dear Mary, do you make of our city?” Always he stakes his claim—“my” Mary, “our” city.
Mary resolves that at the very least—say Samuel what he may—she will be the object of derision to no stranger. She will not ask for directions, or stare as though she is unaccustomed to crowds, or to any sort of chaos, or to the smudgy black of coal dust, as though she has never seen such a fine boot withdraw itself under a cascade of orange silk, or a dead horse stepped over as if an irregular cobblestone, or the boys in their tattered clothes sitting atop cans and crates, staring. Though if anyone cared to watch Mary long enough, he would see the hesitations in her purposeful stride (how easily distracted), the agitated pauses—here adjusting her hat, there unfastening the buttons of her gloves. And how, when she arrives at 51 First Avenue, she tips back her umbrella and looks full on the sky, as though expecting sustenance there.
She offers herself to the steady November rain. Here, thinks Mary. Here is all—and none of it Samuel’s. “You’ll catch death,” her mother would say to her and Lucy when they were young and stayed out in rainstorms or ran barefoot on dares through April snow. Not “You’ll catch pneumonia,” or “That’ll be the death of you,” but “You’ll catch death.”
“So be it,” she whispers aloud, taking in the breadth of gray sky— the finality of the clouds, the inconsequent fringe of building-tops around. Sky, in which the private earth is buried.
Jimmy Roberts must have written her that. Suppose somewhere close by he thinks of her.
Perfectly plausible, she reassures herself, wiping rain from her eyes. Having once loved, do we ever stop? Maybe it was foolishness to call the throbbing in her temple love when she should know better. She is old enough: old enough to know how trouble comes. All naming a bedevilment and surprise. She is always surprised. The lines that have begun to mark her face these last few winters are arches across her forehead: She must have, more than any other impulse, frown, or squint, widened her eyes at the world she sees. Like an animal at the edge of the woods, stilled by a human scent, tail up, ears perked, eyes wide, whites showing. Call it alarm, fright—or wonder: Why not?
Peas inside a pod surprise her. She had not taken the peas off the fence before she and Edwin left for New York. That carelessness born of Samuel’s new wealth. It was no longer necessary. They hung there still for all she knew, many more unharvested than needed for seed alone, their tightly twisted vines inky dark, impenetrable as crabbed handwriting, more tenacious than she’d imagined. She had opened one velvety black pod—idly, a scientist now and not a farmer—while Edwin was hitching the horses, and had been surprised to find inside perfect pale-green peas, unharmed by rot, ready to plant come spring. There, without her vigilance. Unruined by her neglect. Samuel was right: Never had her gardens failed. But for that she was not due praise or blame or remarks on her charm across rivers. No gardener dares predict the harvest. So who is she to venture what is to be found, in the story she has carefully tended for so many years.
Jimmy Roberts could be inside the door, here. Now.
Would he recognize her? And if he did, would he be disappointed to see the difference sixteen years have wrought? Though surely he would at least honor what was. His boyhood would come back to him, and the places he’d left, and in her presence time compress to the thinnest line. His heart would skip and race, too; his head bent with dizziness, he would yank off his gloves from the need to do something—is that too much to imagine? He, too, might walk all the way to Union Square, and back down again nearly to Houston Street, just to screw up his courage to speak.
Mary, he would say.
She shivers at his voice on her name.
Is it really you? he would ask. After all these years?
Jimmy Roberts! she would reply (if words came). Imagine that, she would say, as though such imaginings had never before brought him to her side.
Every Past Thing Becomes Strange. That will be her first sentence in the green book. And then, as she has in her garden journals, she will describe and measure the constant rain of these afternoons she has spent walking alone down every street of lower Manhattan. The wide-ocean feeling at the very tip of the island: From here one can sail around the world. (How she would like to carry that air home with her.) The warmth of this strange November makes people stop to unbutton their coats, and pause to look at one another. With such weather, is any human story surprising?
The rain has drenched her, has caught the curls about her neck and pulled them straight, so that the wet dribbles down her neck, along her spine.
Why, in the middle of such a downpour, does she stand, looking heavenward?
As if—
Beseeching? Praying?
Neither, exactly.
Is it a gesture of relief, then?—like that of a child who, after carefully skirting a series of puddles, finally jumps in, trouble be damned.
Maybe. Yet what of the aspect of grief?
As she stands and looks up at the sky, Jimmy Roberts watches her. He must be. If he would be surprised to find her in his neighborhood, at least he would not find the extravagant gesture unfamiliar. That is the Mary I know, he would think, watching her drop her umbrella and turn her face to the sky. Were I to go close enough, she would let me pull a loose thread and unravel secrets and true things, not anything waste, not anything that would let me forget what I belong to (the sky, its fragments of star, the earth below). She might tell me about her girlhood game of grabbing bees in her fist to
