Empty, save for a formal arrangement of flowers in the parlor window. The last time she had managed such elegance was in the days of the summer guests. Empty, save the shadow in the upstairs bedroom. For a long time, whenever Edwin left the Shelburne apartment, she would squint into the tiny rectangles he had made of the windows, trying to see into the darkness, trying to understand what he had made there. The shape in Effie’s window reptilian, something creeping and prehistoric. One morning it seemed a giant lizard, devouring its young. And then she did not look again. If one person sees God in the sky and another Storm; what is the use of argument? She will put that, somewhere.
Edwin is near Mary, and near the shadows, but not obscured by them as she is. Energy restrained in the cross of his legs, the sun glinting off his shiny best shoes. It was as if he’d taken Effie’s liveliness into himself— crossed his own legs exactly as she’d crossed hers and stared hard, sassy, right at Mr. J. K. Patch when she’d stood for her studio photograph.
The new Effie is under a summer sky, far away, near almost to stepping out of the painting altogether, and taking Her Excellency with her.
Did he think that he was leading her out of our realm and into another? When he contemplates all those photographs of the Dearly-Departeds and breathes color into their countenances, does he imagine himself Charon, performing a service, ferrying those who’ve been left behind across the River Styx, for a last look?
She does not understand him. When she looks at what he sees—the Dearly-Departeds rendered in albumin and silver, and his hand, dusting them with the color of life and then framing them in somber, funereal black—she cannot imagine how he thinks of them. “A roof and corn-mush,” he said. “Shelter and sustenance.” But she never believed that was all. His close peering at those tiny photographs of the Departeds through his magnifying glass belied such disinterest. No, she knew (if she knew anything of him at all) that he searched for clues, there, in the reproductions. What did you know? she imagines him asking each person.
He painted Effie wearing the lace collar Mary hadn’t had time to finish. Such a thing a luxury, after all. And luxury after everything, even in winter, when time swelled in the long dark evenings around the stove. Luxury after fire and food and socks and comfort when she fell. She had left the crochet hook in the last row when Effie’s fever rose.
He knew that.
If someone had asked her, Does Edwin notice what you’re doing?— she would not have guessed he knew by heart what she was crocheting before she’d even stopped and shaken the lace out and held it high. Yet he had. He’d picked up her last row and bound it off, held it up complete, smoothing it over Effie’s shoulders.
That is her husband. Gone, and then surprising her with observations that only one present could have gleaned. Her powers of observation are not as great, she knows very well, without Samuel’s mocking her. She forgets even Effie. Every day she loses her further, until it seems that only her deep-brown eyes remain, painted in permanent inquiry. She can no longer hear her voice. If she remembers things Effie said—that she called mica “civilized magic” or asked, “If the year zero didn’t begin the world, what happened to people to make them count?”—these words come to her now as something hardened for having been repeated so many times, no longer Effie’s own.
It starts to be as if she never lived. And if Effie, her dearest, whose death she thought she would not survive, had been but a dream, she must be herself something even less. “Come now,” she hears Emeline saying. “You don’t mean that.”
Depend upon it: There are always the Sensibles to comfort the Aggrieved. (She would write that.) She once suspected Emerson’s sincerity about his son Waldo, and longed to surpass the years and miles to bang on his study door and voice her protest. Or was it comfort she wanted to give? (The intertwining of comfort and protest—that may be useful.) He had been left too long alone among his books. Though surely he had Emelines of his own to dust off his desk and dispense the occasional “Nonsense!”
What is Thought, what an Idea, at the family table. (She could start there: all the family at dinner.) If daughters and sons are but dreams, then words less still. Less than dust. Anyone knows that. Emerson, the most dearly beloved professor of her college by the stove, gone from this world longer than Effie. Yet his words seem real inside her: It does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. So he’d said of his son Waldo. (Though Emerson was lucky to have another, and daughters, too.) He grieved that grief could teach him nothing.
Mary, full of admiration, hesitates to argue. She sits, at 51 First Avenue. She has a pen, and a book, whose pages are mostly empty.
Emerson’s great scouring instinct—the vigorous circles of his thought, scrubbing away crust and convention—the light he shines on his own appetites and ways give her a vision. He is a man who found a Method (conversion of thought to object, she names it, her hand on her pen.) If Edwin can bind off the last row of her lace collar, and Emerson get up his old heart again, then why shouldn’t she impart and invest her own ounce? As he puts it.
Here is my Grief, she will write.
And here are its lessons, she would like very much to tell Samuel.
“Sketch quickly,” the drawing instructor says, as he weaves in and out of the row of students’ easels. In front of one; behind the next. Such deliberate pattern amuses him. He holds a chalk in his hand and taps it against his palm as though he is a musical master marking tempo.
“When your time is up,” he tells the class, “commit the Arab to memory.”
Ward the Lesser, the students call him, in unkind comparison to his older brother, the sculptor John Q. A.
“When your time is up,” Edwin mutters. “Sketch quickly”—that’s what he’s done his whole life, so why should he sit in a classroom to be so instructed? The framing for the bay windows drawn in dirt with his foot. First drawings for the Patent Office finished one night while everyone else slept. “The Arab.” Ward’s tone no different than if he’d said “the vase” or “the rose” or any inanimate thing. “Commit to memory.” To the asylum, more like.
Edwin is irrevocably, poisonously, irritable, and though his irritation did not begin in this class, Ward has deepened it, distracted it, blown it up into a bluster of angry confusion. Edwin takes Ward as interlocutor— though he does not want him, does not want his terms, and knows that in accepting them he has lost, whatever argument he makes.
Does he have a name? Edwin thinks to ask. Because he admires the model’s concentration. Especially in such circumstances. For an hour, his hand nestled in his thick beard, holding up his head, he has appeared to think deeply—about—what?
Edwin will never know. The man’s own language must have gestures of title and respect and without knowing even these, without any place to start, Edwin sees very little reason to speak of memory or its committal.
He wants a fight (Samuel would not be so easily pushed to fury). Show us what you can do, Lesser brother.
While Edwin imagines what Ward might do, with paper and chalk and memory, a picture comes to him: He is in the middle of Goodnow stream in the early spring, carefully balanced atop a moss-slicked rock, trying to divert the water’s path with a log. What is he doing there? He does not remember. Memory holds only this: a heavy, man-sized shape of futility, shivering, holding a log at an impossible angle, and the water bubbling on around him, unfatigued. In the picture, his own figure would be secondary to the churn of river. (Men could harness the power of water—he had only to walk down the hill into Shelburne to see that. But that is not what interests him.) Feeding the Trout, he will call it.
“Quickly.” Ward jolts Edwin from his reverie, and he bristles.
If he wants quick, let him go to the photographers. If it’s a race, Edwin would rather bow out now. The drone of his uncle praying