Unsheltered Read online

  Zeke made a face. “In Jersey.”

  “I know, you’re thinking it’s some gigantic tacky suburb of Manhattan. I thought that too, I was ready to—” She stopped herself from saying “kill myself,” two words now excised from the family vocabulary. “I couldn’t stand the thought, when the job for Dad came up at Chancel. But Vineland isn’t what I expected. It’s more like Virginia, really.”

  “And what is that like, Mom?”

  “We lived there almost eight years, the longest we’ve been anyplace since you were born. How can you not know?”

  “Because, let me think, I was in college in California and grad school in Boston?”

  “But you were home for summers, a couple of them. One, I guess. And holidays. You were there almost every Christmas that I recall.”

  “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And Christmas trees, I certainly remember those. Virginia has blue ridges. It’s for lovers!”

  She tried to smile. “You’re saying your family lived in Virginia and all you got was this lousy bumper sticker?”

  “No. I’m saying it’s not my frame of reference. I’m an adult, and my life experience is separate from yours.”

  Willa understood there was no real point to this argument except that she was standing here, and his beloved was not. He looked so tired. The sun through the window washed his face in an unmerciful light that rendered him old. Or worn, like old clothes. Not young enough to be her son.

  A howl from the bassinet startled them both. The baby came to wakefulness with alarm, every time. Light, life, hunger, it all must feel like violation in the beginning. Willa let her son go to the baby. Opened a kitchen cabinet to start dinner or make a bottle or pack up dishes, she really had no idea. She watched Zeke pick up the tiny body with its dangling bowed legs and big saggy diaper. A new parent should be joyful. Not widowed, deserted, bankrupt, bereft of every comfort he’d carefully built for himself. For months to come, waking up would feel as violent for Zeke as for a newborn. Maybe for years.

  “Shhhh, take it easy, buddy,” he crooned as he laid his child on the changing table and nervously kept one palm on the baby’s torso as the little limbs jerked and flailed. With his free hand Zeke pulled a diaper from the package, tucked it under his chin, and unfolded it. Willa remembered in her gut how it felt to be the parent of a newborn: the excruciating love and terror of breakage.

  “I’m lousy at this, buddy. You have to bear with me. I’m a rank beginner here.”

  “You’re not lousy,” Willa said quietly. “We’re all beginners.”

  2

  Beginners

  The walk from the builder’s office to Plum Street spanned four blocks and felt like an Atlantic passage. Thatcher dragged his anchor of bad news across the threshold of his house, closed the door quietly, set his hat on the hall table, and looked into the parlor. The drapes were drawn against the heat and Rose stood with her back to the door. Alone, he was relieved to see. Not with her mother on the sofa parsing threads of gossip, both ready to drop their needlework and turn up their eyes with bottomless female expectation.

  She was holding herself oddly, very close to the west window. Rose was peering. She held the drape aside with one hand and pressed her face into the slim vertical bar of daylight, so absorbed in some furtive observation she must not have heard him come in. He moved quietly across the room to stand behind her and set his hand on her waist, causing her to jump.

  “Thatcher! You’re home from the builders.” She spoke without turning around.

  He laid his folder of calculations on the side table so he could set both hands parenthetically on her little center and his chin on the top of her head. Unbustled and unbonneted like this, Rose was a gravitational body that drew his front against her back, his bearded jaw against her tidy zenith. Their perfect fit sent a whiskey thrill through his veins. After six months of marriage he was still in thrall of his wife’s physical properties, and wondered whether this made him a lucky man or a doomed one. In the weeks since they’d moved to Vineland he’d settled on lucky. The town was slim on other inebriants.

  “What do you see out there?” With his mandible against her skull he had to lift his upper jaw a little when he spoke. He felt married. A thing so unexpected.

  She didn’t answer. He adjusted his head to her angle of view and looked between the beech and oak saplings that framed the parlor window, into the neighboring territory of Dr. and Mrs. Treat. The doctor of that house had recently vanished, according to Rose, though no foul play was accused. Well, not quite true: rumor had him off to New York under the influence of a glamorous suffragette who was known to be a champion of free love. Thatcher didn’t begrudge the doctor his freedom, but did cast an envious look at the Treats’ intact roof. Scanning down the gutters, his eyes settled on something or someone in the grass, partially obscured by the yew hedge.

  It was Mrs. Treat in a dark blue dress lying facedown on the ground.

  “Good Lord. Is she well?”

  “Yes,” Rose whispered. “Now and again, she moves.”

  “What is she doing?”

  “Counting ants. Or spiders!”

  Breathless intrigue. His wife sounded like a schoolgirl inventing scandal against a rival. But Mrs. Treat in her dismal indigo and advanced years was certainly no rival. And the charge might be valid. Thatcher had heard from more reliable sources than Rose that this woman held strange entertainments. He tilted his head for a clearer look through one of the little panes, wondering what architect had dreamed up these hateful windows: multiple interlaced lenses of leaded glass as intricate as the hide of a fish. The house had a thousand of these panes rattling loose in their nettings. When any door slammed, they tinkled like a world of shattered goblets. And in this domestic nest, doors did slam.

  It struck him now: the architect would have been Rose’s father, in league with a covey of amateurs who’d convinced him of his competence. The builder Thatcher had visited that morning told him what everyone in this tittle-tattle village surely knew already, that the house was built on a dead man’s pacts with poker-game comrades who fancied themselves craftsmen. All would know it except Rose and her mother. The news would fall on them cruelly, for in the absence of the man they had only his construction to love. Over Rose’s shoulder Thatcher looked down at her neat chest, the dear rise and fall.

  As for the woman outside, no movement was detectable. “Love thy neighbor, little rabbit. Mrs. Treat deserves our charity.”

  “She could be prostrate with grief,” Rose speculated. “Over Dr. Treat.”

  “I think not. Unless the good doctor has seen fit to come back from New York and take up residence with her again.”

  “That isn’t charitable at all! Everyone says Dr. Treat is tedious, but surely she would rather have him at home than no husband at all.”

  Thatcher grinned. “Couldn’t a dull husband be cause for a wife’s grieving?”

  Rose dropped the drape and turned to face him, a pivot on her own marvelous axis. Smiling. “You are a beast.”

  “It isn’t my fault. You’ve put me at cross-purposes, expecting me to defend Dr. Treat. You’re taking advantage of my position.”

  “What is your position, Thatcher?”

  “Husband, with the duty of taking up for all husbands. Isn’t that the rule? As wives must bear the crosses of all other wives?”

  Rose appeared to be thinking this over. “Mrs. Treat is a wife,” she said finally. “And I won’t take up for her. She is a spectacle.”

  “And not overly concerned with being a wife, as far as I can see. You are acquitted.”

  Rose tilted her chin up and he bent to kiss her, moved by the simplest physics.

  They stepped apart, startled by a commotion in the hallway. That would be Polly. No other creature could make such an abruption of leaving and entering a house: Polly bashing the door shut, mewling to the dogs, tossing something with a clatter onto the hall table. She burst into the parlor, arresting Rose and Thatcher. />
  “Oh good, you’re both here. I have the most awful news to tell you!”

  “What is it?” Rose’s hand flew to the ribbon tied at her throat, as if it might be holding her together. Thatcher welcomed the reprieve from delivering his own news.

  “A runaway barouche! On Landis Avenue. I saw everything.”

  Polly dropped onto the settee and flung out her legs as if thrown from a horse herself. She was twelve, a decade younger and already several hands taller than her sister, with a surplus of leg, chin, and forehead equal to her temperament. It wouldn’t occur to Polly to apologize for any of it. “No one was killed, and that is the miracle according to Mother. It was Pardon Crandall’s barouche but he wasn’t in it. He’d left it standing and gone to meet someone on the nine-five from Philadelphia. The train whistle set the horses off running and they went straight into a tree in front of the post office.”

  “That maple?” Thatcher cared for trees, more than for some people if he had to say. He kept a private habit of assigning botanical character to his familiars: Polly was a hollyhock, cheerful, forthright, tallest bloom in the garden. Rose of course was a rose.

  “The maple is all right,” Polly assured him, “but the crash knocked the rear wheels off the barouche. Both wheels!”

  Rose’s hand now went to her cheek. “You were with Mother? That must have given her a shock. She adores Mrs. Crandall.”

  “Mother,” Polly announced, “has gone upstairs to take some Dr. Garvin’s and pray about the accident.”

  “Well, it sounds as if the outcome is already decided,” Thatcher said. “But a dose of Dr. Garvin’s won’t hurt.”

  “But you haven’t heard the rest! After the barouche lost its wheels, the horses dragged it all the way down Landis Avenue on just the little front ones. It looked like a Roman chariot race. If only Mr. Crandall had stayed on, he could have been a study for ‘The Charioteer.’”

  The Charioteer! Thatcher was impressed that Polly had extended her curriculum to the province of naked Greek men. He glanced at Rose, who seemed to have missed it.

  Polly untied her straw bonnet, an old flat boater of a kind favored by boys, absent the ribbons, and exasperating to elder sisters. She flung the hat on the settee with a thrilled little shudder that spilled her hair into a dark, careless coil on her shoulders. “The axles or something underneath left a gouge down the street. It made the horriblest scraping sound. You could hear it for miles.”

  “Well, we didn’t,” Rose stated, as if that would end the story.

  “It must have just happened,” Thatcher said. “I was walking on Landis Avenue not more than fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Yes, it was just this very minute!” Polly looked up at him with round blue eyes, exactly like her sister’s and yet entirely different. Searching for truth, not rescue. “Mother couldn’t watch, but I saw all of it. The horses crashed into the stand in front of the tobacconist’s. And that still wasn’t the end of the chase.”

  Thatcher put his hands over his eyes, grinning. “Not the tobacconist’s.”

  “Yes! One of the horses tried to go into Finn’s shop! He smashed the window and put glass everywhere. He must have wanted a cigar very desperately.”

  “After so much excitement, you can understand it,” Thatcher said.

  “All right, Polly. Go upstairs and see about Mother. And straighten yourself up, please. Look at your shoes.”

  Polly gave Rose an exhausted look, swiped up her hat by its ribbons, and stood to leave. Thatcher felt his soul touched by light. He hadn’t known the pleasure of younger siblings and counted this one as a very good wedding gift, although that was one of several secrets he kept from his wife.

  “And your hair will need a brush before you come down to luncheon.”

  Polly stopped and turned back in the doorway, suddenly bright eyed with more to tell. “I nearly forgot. President Grant is coming.”

  “What, here?” Rose blinked with pretty surprise.

  “Yes. For the dedication, in a few weeks. September I think. When the school building opens. Thatcher, you will get to shake hands with His Majesty the President and sit on the stage and everything. Professor Cutler will try to be in charge, but he’ll have to share some of his glory with the new science teacher because Cutler is a humid old windbag and everyone knows it. And you are handsome and mysterious.”

  “Mysterious,” Thatcher repeated.

  “Well, because of being new, and no one properly knowing about you yet.”

  “Oh, well. That is the lowest order of mysterious.”

  “But the whole town will see you with President Grant! And then we shall be famous.” She strode out with the boater swinging in an arc like an o’possum caught by its tail, a sight Thatcher actually knew from his brutish boyhood. One more tale that could not be told in this house, as much as it would have thrilled Polly.

  “Get Gracie to help with your hair!” Rose called after her.

  “Gracie is busy consoling Mother. I’ll ask Mrs. Brindle!” Polly crowed as she tramped up the stairs.

  “You will not ask the cook to fix your hair!”

  Rose’s translucent skin flushed with the unusual effort of raising her voice. The rosy blush and intoxicating fragrance, all the exquisite agreements of Rose in name and spirit, had been the origin of his attraction. Rarely did people wear their floral identities so frankly. Aside from himself: Greenwood, the sapling. Too easily bent.

  Rose brushed the skin of her bare arms as if physically shedding her vexation. “Charioteers and horses with cigars! What a creature she is, to enjoy a story like that.”

  Thatcher, a similar creature, knew to camouflage himself under something resembling forbearance. “Will I have to keep the reins over a dozen Pollies at a time when the school term begins? I’m not sure I’m a man for the task.”

  “There is only one Polly, dear. In Vineland or anywhere. We would have done better to keep her in Boston until she finished at Mrs. Marberry’s. I know you disagree.”

  He saw Rose glance at his leather folder on the table. “Polly, left behind in Boston? That would have distressed her beyond repair.”

  “Or in some other school like Mrs. Marberry’s. They must exist here, despite all the free thinking. Even spiritualists and transcendentalists must sometimes turn out daughters who need that kind of medicine.”

  Thatcher was only beginning to learn what spiritualists and transcendentalists required. Before meeting Rose he’d scarcely heard of Vineland, and imagined men debating philosophy under clouds of expensive tobacco smoke. He’d applied for the post at the high school because Rose and her mother, Aurelia, longed to return to this place.

  “I think Mrs. Marberry is well enough left behind,” he said. “Polly had no more use for her than she has for my employer. What did she call him? A humid windbag?”

  Rose smiled slightly.

  “High marks for poetry and accuracy. Your sister’s gifts are comprehensive.”

  “Mrs. Marberry would have triumphed eventually.”

  “I couldn’t call it a triumph. An active mind should be fed the meat of the world.”

  “Goodness, Thatcher, the meat of the world. What sort of carnivory is that?”

  “Mathematical tables. Botanical names …”

  “The vegetables of the world, then,” she corrected patiently.

  “I only mean wonderments, of any kind that compel her. Things that are real.”

  “Do you really see Polly improved by botany? I can only think of the further infliction on her shoes.”

  “What I see is that she shouldn’t be punished with ladies’ novels and the correct execution of curtsies. She told me they spent weeks at Mrs. Marberry’s memorizing the timetables for replacing organza with crepe in the mourning period for this or that degree relative on the mother’s or father’s side.”

  “How soon men would become beasts. You have no family to lose, Thatcher, but have pity on the rest of us, please. Do you see no value in following respec
tful custom?”

  “I do. And I expect it’s all written somewhere. In case I should suddenly discover a second-degree relative on my dead mother’s side, and then lose him again, I could go to a library and learn my duty in the way of armbands and cravats.”

  “There is virtue in training one’s mind to these matters, even if they are not used.”

  “Precisely. Let us then apply Polly to the square of the hypotenuse.”

  “You’ll have your chance. In a few years’ time.”

  Thatcher would teach the natural and physical sciences, not mathematics, he might have reminded her, but Rose could hardly be bothered with the difference. She picked up his portfolio and opened it, a broad wingspan of leather in her petal hands. She wouldn’t understand the menace in those drawings. And contrary to all he had just insisted, he would give anything to hide it from his household of women.

  “What did the builders say?” she asked, laying down the portfolio.

  “I’m afraid it’s not good.” He felt his heart beating at the knife edge of his collar. Rose looked up at him without the slightest change in her weather.

  “Can it really cost so much to repair a roof?”

  He took her hands in his, rubbing his thumbs over the plump little knuckles, and was struck with the memory of a foetal pig he’d dissected in his first year at university. Despite what he’d already seen in war and the many cadavers afterward in his years as a doctor’s assistant, he still had paused at the moment of cutting into that pink curve of flesh. Then and there, in the company of scholars in a laboratory, Thatcher saw himself as a man who would open this piglet to study its organs. Most would want only to sweeten the flesh with cider and see it braised for supper. Every education brings a point of reckoning, and this was his: seeing the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners.

  But here in hand was Rose, clearly on the side of sweetness, who still had consented to marry him. The divide must sometimes yield. “If it were only the roof, we wouldn’t be in for much trouble. But I’m afraid the whole house is at odds with itself.”