the paths laid out for them: Neither scholars nor wool merchants would they become. Perhaps then Samuel’s hopes for Edwin were not misplaced, because Edwin has proved to have a genius for worldly failure.
It was all very well for Giotto, who could sketch his sheep with a stone, as they flocked about him, grazing. “That’s it! That’s all Edwin needs,” Samuel had said, when she read aloud Giotto’s unlikely story, how the great painter Cimabue had happened upon the boy shepherd drawing on a rock on a hill in Vespignano. “To be seen. We’ll bring him down from the hills. We’ll find him a master.” She would see. They would all see, how astonishing it was that years after their boyhood home had burned to the ground, Edwin could render it precisely from memory.
Very well. She has no comment on talent, or boyhood. But she does know that the portrait of Samuel that hangs in their hallway has something about it not at all a likeness. It’s not a portrait of the Samuel Elmer she knows.
When Alice pushes aside the curtains again (though she had promised herself she would read until a knock came), a woman and a man standing on the bottom step so surprise her that for a moment it seems impossible that they should be real. Impossible that they are they and she is she. Impossible that they should matter to her at all, this small woman and this dark-haired man with the top hat just slightly out of fashion. (Too tall, she judges.) Impossible that they plan to approach her door. Yet they look up in her direction, as if their steps toward her had already been approved by a divine order, to which everyone save she is privy. All the people who are not Alice Elmer, and see as she does not. If she were consulted, she does not remember.
All because she had once taken off a stranger’s hat. Alice stops to think of that moment, as someone else might drink for courage—to think that she was a woman of such audacity (and beauty—but could she help that?) that once she had walked up to a man she desired and removed his hat; to think that this very man, father of a grown daughter, had married her soon after! From this distillation of the past, Alice draws fortitude. Filling in the substance of Samuel’s frame, the intensity of his brown eyes—how exceptional had been their meeting! How quickly they had fallen in together!—she strengthens herself.
And looks again at the man and woman on the bottom step. The woman’s back to her. She’s tiny, clad in a dark wrap. A pinch to her shoulder blades, as if they were folded wings, delicate, poised for flight. Fragile, Alice decides. This is what Samuel dared not say. So this is Mary, on Alice’s step, a sister now. Because of a hat. Because Alice had lifted Samuel Elmer’s top hat from his head, and brushed back the hair that fell across his forehead before the thought came to either of them what it meant, for a man to be so touched by a woman he did not know. The familiarity of it—smoothing his hair! Because of that, Alice peers through the opening in her curtains at this woman and this man. They are not coming up, Alice realizes with quick relief. They must have taken down the wrong number. They must be someone else’s guests.
When the small woman reaches to touch the end of the man’s thick dark mustache—not at all streaked with white like Samuel’s, does he color it?—the gesture takes Alice by surprise. Though nothing is more ordinary than a wife touching a husband, she supposes. The woman’s hands small and purposeful. She must offer to take Mary’s gloves—if she be Mary—and look to see if Edwin’s mustache has streaked them black. She supposes his color could be natural: He is a year younger than Samuel. And softer, she thinks. Slighter. Vague where Samuel is definition and substance. How much she prefers the brother who is hers! And how much she prefers the brother who is not hers to his wife. Her tininess makes Alice feel too large. And the fragility of her bones, clumsy. She, Alice, is not fine enough, not acute enough. Well!—she cannot help if she prefers not to sigh or grieve or think about life as it might have been. She grants Mary virtue—she cannot say that applying oneself to libraries and political committees and Lord knows what else is not virtuous. But she, Alice, is the one Samuel has chosen. She had taken his hat, and he had taken her.
Samuel always spoke of Mary softly, as if to raise his voice to its usual daylight volume would chase away the few words that came: “Light and quick. And—”
“And?”
“And then—then Effie died. Just nine years old. Their only. After that—”
When Alice saw that Samuel was somewhere else, making she knew not what of the border between wainscoting and the papered walls above, she frowned, impatient with his silence (though if she had seen her reflection, she would have softened the furrows between her brows and parted her lips slightly, to suggest the ease with which words might pass, to indicate her willingness to hear all he might say).
“What happened to Edwin then?”
Samuel squinted at her, as if he did not understand whom she meant.
“Edwin. Your brother.”
“Oh, well. Edwin.” Samuel rolled his eyes and moved as if to stand, then reached toward her instead, dragging his thumb across her lip. Though perhaps he had not meant to dismiss Edwin in favor of making love to Alice, the possibility pleased her: that he might, with her, forget all that came before.
“Some things cannot be told,” he said after.
Alice tightened the quilts over them, as though the past were a wind.
“Shall we?” asks Edwin, as he and Mary pause before mounting the steps to Samuel’s house.
“Here we are,” she says, as if that alone were assent. “Central Park West.”
Samuel is at his best with women, Mary thinks, as she watches him across the room with Alice, his head inclined, all slowness and attention. How wrong she and Edwin had been not to have encouraged him to remarry sooner. He should not have been alone all those years after Alma died. Alone as far as people knew (Mary inserts a space for his life across the road, behind the closed doors of the Whiting house, and in the New Haven boardinghouse, and goodness knows what other places he traveled). Alone, after Alma’s parents had called the day a day, and Maud was tucked into bed, and Nellie had finished in the kitchen and gone home. Samuel stayed awake, next to the light that glowed in the big front window, reading with his chair pushed back and his feet up on the table. Other nights, he sat at the table leaning over his account books. And in the summer, when she took the dishtowel out to hang it over the porch rail and stood very still, she could hear the creak of his rocking chair out on the porch, and through the lilac bush she could make out Samuel’s silhouette, as though the creaking illumined the chair and its inhabitant.
How clever Edwin had been to build the house where a lilac bush already stood: an atheist’s prayer, she thought; his salute to nature’s pace. She looked for Samuel through its branches. If she could hear him and see him, she realized late one summer, he must know that she was there, too. Hello Samuel, said the scrape of her kitchen door, where it scratched gray arcs into the floorboards. Mary, she understood the creak of his reply. Hello, dear Mary.
Sometimes she wondered what it was that had kept them both from crossing the road late at night. Neither of them ever lacked things to say. Perhaps for him it was no comfort to hear the noises of his brother’s house. At least not the same sweetness it was for her to know he was there. When he left for good and took Maud with him, she decided that he must not have known of her presence, must never have thought of the nighttime noises as a kind of conversation between them, because otherwise he would not have kept the lamp lit all those nights later on—he could not have meant for her to see him with Nellie like that.
With a woman, he is in his element. She and Edwin should not have been surprised or hurt when he announced that he was moving away. Alma still walked at night there. Edwin said as much. Mary, too, had started out the door and stood, looking across the road and down the hill, realizing she’d come out to tell Alma something. Then she would have to recite the facts: Alma with her cloud of black hair will not walk down these steps again, nor open the door to the porch, nor yell Cocorico, the French rooster’s dinner call. She will not answer any call; she will not sneak in the back door and sit at the kitchen table until someone finds her. Still, when she heard Samuel’s chair creaking late at night, it seemed to Mary as if Alma’s chair moved beside it.
Who