many times, yet she does not often pause to think of it.
Somewhere in Connecticut, it must have been, she no longer minded the train’s speed. Would the past now seem slow? When they returned home next spring, would she be impatient holding the horse’s reins up in front of his picture wagon, the back full of frames and photographs and crayons and paints?
She nods her thanks to the red-haired man, who smiles at her and makes a teasing gesture of peeking into her notebook—a motion that at once pays her the compliment, I want to know, and at the same time assures that he would never look. She takes a grateful sip of the steaming cider, and then spreads both her hands on the table. How strange they look. This morning at the whip-snap machine, her right hand gripping the black-handled wheel and left the braided whip, her hands had seemed part of his unwieldy invention and not her own body. She watched the two five-fingered instruments—small, they are, and her fingernails never glowed as pink as he had made them in her portrait—one turning the crank, the other moving back and forth, her eye no longer following the three strands becoming one braid. They had been three: Edwin and Mary and Effie. Two strands don’t hold without the third to braid them. No, she chides herself, for harmful metaphor. No. Two strands might very well be plied together; she had done so herself, countless times.
Every Past Thing Becomes Strange. Her sentence has a word for each finger, like Effie’s hand on the keys of their upright piano, reciting the notes as she pressed—C, D, E, F, G—and back down G, F, E, D, C. Cat, Dog, Elephant, Finch, Goat. Goat, Finch, Effie did clap.
Come Down Eddie For Good—Good For Eddie Did Come.
She hopes good will come for him. She is not at all sure what sentence she wants to follow Every Past Thing, so she contemplates her husband. Her mind a hush, a prayer, she thinks, though she has not prayed since the war of her childhood, the War against the South, when her mother had cursed and forsworn any further mention of God. Mary conjures him, Edwin, as she’d once invented God: with a paintbrush in his hand, of course, his fine dark brows slightly furrowed, his dark eyes fixed on something she can’t see. She is interested, suddenly, in this difficulty: how, busy looking so intently at him, she can’t possibly see what he sees; staring can bring her no closer to the mystery he is. He would be interested in a puzzle like that. He would line up his magic glass, to see the world upside down and his own stare given back, all of that at once, in one painting.
After she writes Strange atop a new page, she stops and looks about. She skips several pages—would that be enough room?—and writes Becomes. After delineating this space and thinking for some minutes about Strangeness and Becoming, and what notes she might another day make about both, she turns another leaf. Thing. And adds an S—for wouldn’t that be more fruitful?
Thing(s)—
A business card that says Artist—His.
A Secret—Mine. And one not mine.
Bones—Hers, under the earth, with her woolen blanket embroidered with rosebuds, with Thos. Jefferson’s Black Hollyhock seeds and my mother’s missing serving spoon with the W atop the handle and clumped roots of Black-Eyed Susans performing their underground winter migration. (But not skin. Not lips or eyes. No longer.) Worms crawl, and stop at our New England rocks and bones.
A letter with a postmark August 1883—from an Undergraduate writing silly nursery poems: Mary, Mary, no longer Wary. (I am, tho’, so.)
Blue and ivory eggs in a nest—“Perfection,” agreed Edwin and Samuel. And they set out to plumb the mysteries of an egg: the one brother to measure and sketch, the other to describe. (Or entertain, in the event that Perfection proved unattainable.)
Stones—tho’ not the gray misshapen monstrosities I stacked to the left of my garden (forgive me if I want something more beautiful than that). Maybe river stones, made round and smooth by water’s Constancy. Each perfect as an egg. Effie used to collect them. Those with stripes down their center and those of deep color, all ovaled and polished to the touch, she named magic. Rough-edged rocks, with flecks of mica, “civilized magic.” When I asked her what she meant, she said, “You know, Mama, not so much. They don’t have the singing.” Where on Earth did she learn a word like Civilized, and to put song outside it?
I buried her pouch of magic stones with her.
I can collect more (will chips of cobblestones and other City rocks suffice?) and fashion my own bag. In case I need to drop them one by one behind me.
Wasn’t that the trick, in nursery stories, for those who feared becoming lost? But this method will not do for Mary. Anything draws her interest. Stones. Galaxies—that ours might not be the only civilization in the universe, and the corollary: If our civilization is so small, then what of one person? A speck on the earth. All opinion and desire even less.
One year she and Effie had kept the clippings from their fingernails, to see how such tiny slivers might accumulate (a cubic inch per year? Buried, would they decompose?) Then months went by; they forgot about that experiment. Though still a faint shadow of plans conceived and plans abandoned darkens the sky when she brushes nail clippings off the windowsill. Samuel is right about her. About her fits and starts.
Very well. Mary flips the book back over, and—as if possessed, she thinks—adds dates like things:
1849, 1850 Susan Smith Elmer gives birth to her eleventh and twelfth children: Samuel and Edwin Romanzo
1860 Mary Jane Ware born
1876 Elmer Bros. (with help of Cousin John) finish the Bray Road house
Congressional Committee reopens case of the Andersonville prison. Confederates claim they repeatedly sought release of prisoners and movement of surgeons and medical supplies and were denied by the Union government
This clipped information reminds only her and would not convey to anyone else how those hearings had devastated her. The betrayal: Her father had died at Andersonville, and need not have, she understood in her sixteenth summer. His life—anyone’s life—worth nothing in the war-makers’ strategic equation. She might have written that: 1876 Trust no government. A realization that turned her more impetuous than she’d already been. More likely to climb out her bedroom window to commune in the fields with a man a decade her senior.
1878 Samuel marries Alma Whiting
2 November 1879 Edwin Romanzo Elmer and Mary Jane Ware, Halifax, Vermont
29 June 1880 Effie Lillian born
1882 Alma dies of pneumonia
1883 Summer visitors in the Buckland house
1884 S. buys our interest in Buckland house and moves to Boston. We remain in the house, Maud with us for meals, Samuel home weekends
1885 Edwin’s roof bracket receives patent
Alma’s mother, Sarah Whiting, dies
Maud goes to live with Samuel
1886 E. invents machine for twisting and braiding silk thread into whip-snaps (S’s company manufactures
