Samuel dug without looking up. Not at the sky, not at each other, not at Mary.
When he left that house, he vowed not to ask anything more of the world. Never again. Having once, at the Cleveland Public Library, immersed himself in the Greeks, he made note of his own hubris, and, chastened, pledged to need nothing at all. (Though he still had Mary.) He was a person who made such vows. He had enough of the old religion to believe absolutely. Never again, he said. And meant it, despite what he’d grown up knowing of the dangers of belief. His own mother had forgiven Pittsfield’s Reverend Miller his first miscalculation and waited on October 22, 1844, for the end of the world on the banks of the Wabash River, his sister Emeline a baby in her arms, while Darwin and the others played in the woods within hollering distance. And the newspaper accounts he’d read of his brother Darwin had blamed his death on a mind “unsettled by the Second Advent fanaticism.” Not to mention Uncle Alfred’s voices. Yet Edwin is capable of conviction—his own, alone, and nobody else’s. He had always ignored the gossip of neighbors. He knew, somewhat foggily, about their head-shaking; he didn’t allow any of it to come into focus. Though about the big house, he’d come to agree: It was an affront to the land. It was simply too tall. The bracketed roof arrogant. Altogether too much striving for effect. A city effect. It fit neither the grandeur of the mountains behind, nor the slow curve of the road uphill, nor the sprawling Whiting farmhouse across the street.
Never again will I ask for anything. He packed one trunk of clothes, paints and brushes, photographs. Put it in the wagon with chairs, his drawing table, her whip-snap machine, enough blankets and dishes for two. Hammered together a box and gave it to her to pack up Effie’s things. And went off down the hill to the center of Shelburne Falls, to settle on a small apartment. No more frescoed walls, no high ceilings, no elaborate moldings, no velvet couches, no tapestries, no billiard room. No orchard with trampled apples underfoot, the brown sweetness everywhere a reminder of ripening and decay.
The house comes to him as a painting already framed, with dark strips of carved walnut splitting the roof from the sky, the house from the orchard, the steps from the grass, the wisteria growing up about the south-facing porch. In the middle, the front door swings open onto a hall and stairs that stretch up alongside a grapevine of a banister. A mad artist’s rendering of Greek columns recedes in the shadows of the hall. He was surely mad. To have built that house. Painted those marble columns. Planted the wisteria. And that wife and that child and that brother perched singing on top of the roof. Instead of making the billiard room off the back hallway, he should have left an empty room for getting down on his knees to thank the stars for such life. For their hearts beating and the birds in the morning. But he does not believe in prayer, or even luck.
In the early morning while Mary and Effie slept, he was always startled by the light. Every morning surprised by how it came around the mountain—Goodnow Hill it was called, though it had enough looming presence to block the light of the rising sun until it was so high in the sky as to be everywhere already.
“Be Goodnow,” Samuel winked at him when he left Monday mornings. “Take care of Alma and Maud for me.”
Be good now. Edwin wonders: When had the tone of that teasing admonition changed? After Alma was gone? Lovely, straight-spined Alma, who saw before anyone else among the village’s founding families the appeal of a man such as Samuel Elmer, and took him by the hand into respectability. And bequeathed him its assets.
No, perhaps Samuel’s tone had always had a trace of mockery, an older-brother edge of superiority, with its suggestion that because Samuel had seen more of the world, it remained for Edwin to be the good one. As if being good were simpler.
Samuel had mocked his youthful infatuation with Effie Ellsler with the same hint of derision. Encouraged him to trade it in for a real woman. (Samuel, as far as he could tell, had already, even then, subscribed to a few of those.) Still, they were both of them the boys who had come home from Cleveland to take care of their parents. Edwin reminds himself of Samuel’s generosity. His encouragement: He had arranged for Edwin to study at the Academy. Yet beneath Samuel’s ostensible willingness, a price. Something Edwin cannot name. And not just a portrait of Alice, though that, he was sure, would do for a start.
The painting under Edwin’s arm bothers him. For this one, he has no excuse. Once, he was not bothered by failure. Didn’t stop long enough to judge himself harshly. Would simply get up again in the morning and start another painting, another money-making endeavor, another building, another invention. But this painting is so bad that the influence of it has carried over into another day. He—stammers to think of it. He is tempted to kick it under bushes at the edge of the park and cover it over with leaves. He’s not signed it. He won’t. Its falseness a poison to him. Yet how could he have done any better? The Academy picks the models. The Academy doles out the assignments. This model was the fashion—and what of it? If, in New York, fashion has greater authority than in the countryside, that is no cause for submission. Why then does he bow to it? Because Samuel has paid for their apartment; because this is his last chance; because Mary is at home making whip-snap after whip-snap. Because, because.
Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! she’d read to him once, after he’d stumbled out of bed and felt his way down the stairs and then to the kitchen door, where she sat, naked, fire burning in the middle of the night. Reading Emerson. Laughing. She thought that was funny. The whole thing: the passage, his squinting at her. She drew comfort from examinations of human foible and weakness; he did not. But perhaps Emerson had it right: The factories of his youth have exhausted his river, and all that’s left to him this trickle.
He does not know how the days passed. Sitting on the steps he and Samuel and Cousin John had put in, he painted in the early dawn while time waited. Nothing else anywhere but the movement of his brush. Until, gradually, their stirring. And then Effie would leap into his arms, bringing back his pulse, and all the seconds ticking away. Mary went on ahead to the kitchen while Effie helped put away his brushes and paints. Then, giddyup! down the stairs on his back. Papa can we grow the same grapes you paint. Papa can we swim today. Papa can I ride Her Excellency. In the kitchen, steam and flame and cornmush and the sweetness of maple sugar and Effie’s chatter and constant movement. The city people not far behind, wanting food and advice.
For many mornings he had painted on the walls of that hallway, rendering a grapevine along the banister and, in the foyer, the marble columns of the ancient world. A fashion, too. Still painting someone else’s world. Yet then his feeling had been so pure! (Hard to imagine, now, with this poison under his arm). Pure or corrupt, no matter: Could he say the painting of his youth was any better than this Arab tucked under his arm? He’d painted quickly then (a facility he’s not lost), wanting to make enough progress to surprise Samuel at the end of the week. The marble columns for him, really. Their grandeur a reminder of the brothers’ shared past. Samuel would see them and think of their time in Cleveland. It wasn’t Paris—but they’d been away. In Cleveland, life had grown larger than chores and turning the day. Silk thread was going to buy them the world, near enough. Spool after spool traded for freedom. For marble, not New England schist. For scholars’ centuries, not a farmer’s seasons.
He had found the figures and sketches of the marble columns in his notebooks when he was packing for New York. A record of the precision with which he’d calculated the growing lengths of each column’s shadow.
After Effie had died, he had fled that house, with those marble columns rising from floor to ceiling, echoing the Corinthian capitals flanking the front door. He had left behind those particular aspirations. That worship of the Greeks—a fashion the other students in his class mocked now. Satterlee himself already a relic to them—and what, then, of his middle-aged apprentice? But was it any different, really, this new obsession with the Orient?
None of this had mattered then. He had simply painted. There had been, then, the promise of time. There had been Effie. Now, of that promise, only his yellowing notebook remains, with its meticulous numbers and measured shadows in fading pencil. And this Arab under his arm. He forgives himself the columns. He had been so young! He forgives himself and Samuel the billiard room, the oyster rooms in town, the house perched too proudly atop the hill, his portrait of the singer Effie Ellsler—all their showy attempts to bring