Nellie left late after tending to Ma Whiting. The world was not small, then.
When we think of someone, Mary wonders, don’t they know, wherever they are, whatever far realm is theirs? Aren’t the ones we love with us always—Jimmy Roberts, she blushes to think, and looks at Edwin. He brushes something from his boot. She turns away before he catches her eye, and looks back at Samuel. Did he think of Nellie? Of her baby? Instead of Gracie, it is Effie whom Mary sees: a small girl with long brown curls leaning over the basket to admire the sleeping baby. You fit in there once, Mary must have told her. For an instant, Mary sees Effie, looking up from the basket in inquiry, turning from Gracie to her. And then she is gone. Mary cannot imagine her anymore. Only her brown eyes (always they were darkness, even the night she was born, when Mary looked into them and saw the question, Why did you bring me here?)
Though Mary’s faith goes so far as to say, The dead are always with us, she is puzzled by her belief. They come down the same staircases and speak in the same mortal voices. But out of time. And if out of time— where? Effie by now or by yesterday grown and aged and born again. The plump sturdiness of a girl about to become woman, unbounded.
Mary watches Alice laugh and Samuel touch her bottom lip—she sees that Alice cannot keep her eyes from him and Samuel’s own crinkle with delight—and she feels old, older than she should be, old enough to be his mother and Edwin’s both. Well: Hadn’t she known them both always? At least since the War’s end.
Alice watches Samuel as he shifts and stretches his arms back behind his head: He looks happy, she supposes, and yet is not content herself with that description. Something is different about him tonight. A flavor she’s not tasted—something foreign to their lives together. At least Maud is not here to see. Impossible, that would be. Alice could not have stood all of the Elmer family together at once—Samuel’s daughter, brother, sister-in-law, all talking about a life she would never know, no matter how long she and Samuel live together. Certainly they would have taken pity on her and narrated the necessary scenes. But without Maud to shift the balance irrevocably toward the past—Why not call it that? It was over and done, wouldn’t they see?—they had slipped into the comfortable conventions of civility reserved for dining couples of little intimacy but circumstantial favor: The husband had grown up with Samuel; the wife had been sent an introduction by neighbors. This, Alice could well manage.
“Excuse me.”
Samuel’s words startle Alice, though she had been waiting for him to speak. But she had thought that he would say something to her. Not this half-swallowed apology directed toward—whom? She had thought he would signal her—fold up his napkin and drop it on his plate, touch her sleeve—before embarking on the evening’s summation, before suggesting easily, but without commitment, future plans. They might take a ride in the park together. He would see about introducing Edwin to Sinclair, who wished to add to his fine collection of paintings.
“Not at all,” Mary answers, withdrawing her feet from under the table and shifting her chair back.
His feet touched Mary’s, Alice thinks. Bony Mary. See that she doesn’t break.
“I’ll make some room over here—” Samuel hauls his feet out from under the cloth and starts to put them right up on the table with the china plates. “Oh-oh,” he laughs, pulling them back just before his heels make a smear of the potatoes. He makes a show of how civilized a clown he is. A thoroughly citified man joking about the country boy he still is at heart.
Mary waves a hand, dismissing Samuel.
Like a mother, thinks Alice. Like a mother clucking disapprovingly over the antics of her beloved son, all the while aglow with the very fact of his existence, that central amazement that cannot be diminished, no matter how bad his behavior.
“Samuel, stop.” Alice slaps his thigh. “Now—” She hesitates before suggesting that the men retire to Samuel’s study, and in her hesitation, Samuel goes over to the sideboard, takes a bottle from ice, and pulls the cork. She claps her hands together in pleasure.
Slipping the stems of the champagne flutes between the fingers of one hand, he shows off: how beautiful and large his hands, that he can hold the glasses so, barely clinking. The glasses are made insubstantial in his hand, the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun, she knows not which. She watches and thinks, Here is happiness, as he pours from high above each glass a precise cascade of the cold wine.
She sees Edwin and Mary exchange a look: This is what they do; very well, this once.
Yes, Alice silently adds. Let them see us as we are.
When Samuel finishes pouring, he sits back comfortably.
He should say something now. He should welcome her to the family, Mary and Edwin to the city. But Samuel acts as though nothing deserves comment, not the fact of their first dinner all together, not having poured champagne—this just another moment in the series of moments that make a dinner or a lifetime. They look into their glasses and concentrate on sipping the champagne, embarrassed for him, Alice thinks, embarrassed that he has not seen the requirements of the moment he himself created. No one asked him to do it!
He sits back in his chair, as comfortable as if he’d been born to it.
“Ah, Mary. How I will enjoy watching this city of ours come out refracted through your great”—he reaches out with his hand, as if it is from the air that he must pluck the proper words—“scattering intelligence.”
Edwin feels everything in him pitch forward. Leave it to Samuel. Leave it to Samuel to deliver the moment for which they had all been waiting, without even knowing it (thus his success in business). He says something unexpected. All evening, all four of them, too timid to move beyond the most circumscribed of territories, as if each had been told the other three were invalids and so dutifully followed doctor’s instructions not to startle the patients. They must be protected from chills, from sudden movements, from shocks. Which of them hadn’t known the parameters of each answer before the question asked? And so arranged a look of interest that was not itself interest but falsely elaborated patience. How can he hope to produce paintings of any worth in these circumstances. “Your trip was good, I trust?” “You are settling in on 23rd Street?” Leave it to Samuel to blow that all up. Goading Mary.
Damn him, Edwin thinks. His provocation is deliberate. In one sentence—harmless enough; he can already hear Samuel’s “What on earth did I say?”—he will upset both Alice and Mary. Though innocence is always his stance, his acumen, his successes, belie it. “Great” will bother Alice, who will not bear to have Samuel’s attention turn to another woman, and Mary, too, who will assume that Samuel is mocking her. “Scattering”—Edwin shuts his eyes against the commentary that will produce. Likely for their entire stay in New York.
Everything in him tenses as he looks from Samuel to Mary. He had known when Samuel sat back in his chair. He knows that posture. The way Samuel settles into his own frame. Impervious to the world. A powerful will in him. And in Edwin, a parallel stiffening that is not power but a kind of primitive terror. As if Samuel could make his heart stop, could bring life as he tries to live it lurching to a halt. He tries to unspool the last minutes, to Samuel’s first settling into his great wing chair, to the lift of his brow. Brother provocateur. He tries to loosen Samuel’s hold on them all. What Samuel said was not so terrible, surely. In fact, wasn’t it kind for him to have called Mary’s intelligence great. Great.
So this is what Samuel makes of this buttoned-up woman, the neck of her crisp shirtwaist holding her head aloft. These women with their books and degrees and sensible clothes. Alice hadn’t thought of intelligence as any explanation for Mary’s quiet. She didn’t think she had gone to college. But Alice has become accustomed to the generous strokes with which Samuel paints the magnificence of others (qualities invisible to her, and others, too, she suspects): the banker with his passion for botany, that boring gentleman who did not get up from the armchair for the whole of the Stanfords’ party (“But how splendidly happy he keeps his wife”). Samuel had only to come up to her, nod in the direction of the woman wearing the dull red dress, and whisper, “Poet,” to entirely transform the woman sheathed in