the object of derision to no stranger. She will not ask for directions, or stare as though she is unaccustomed to crowds, or to any sort of chaos, or to the smudgy black of coal dust, as though she has never seen such a fine boot withdraw itself under a cascade of orange silk, or a dead horse stepped over as if an irregular cobblestone, or the boys in their tattered clothes sitting atop cans and crates, staring. Though if anyone cared to watch Mary long enough, he would see the hesitations in her purposeful stride (how easily distracted), the agitated pauses—here adjusting her hat, there unfastening the buttons of her gloves. And how, when she arrives at 51 First Avenue, she tips back her umbrella and looks full on the sky, as though expecting sustenance there.
She offers herself to the steady November rain. Here, thinks Mary. Here is all—and none of it Samuel’s. “You’ll catch death,” her mother would say to her and Lucy when they were young and stayed out in rainstorms or ran barefoot on dares through April snow. Not “You’ll catch pneumonia,” or “That’ll be the death of you,” but “You’ll catch death.”
“So be it,” she whispers aloud, taking in the breadth of gray sky— the finality of the clouds, the inconsequent fringe of building-tops around. Sky, in which the private earth is buried.
Jimmy Roberts must have written her that. Suppose somewhere close by he thinks of her.
Perfectly plausible, she reassures herself, wiping rain from her eyes. Having once loved, do we ever stop? Maybe it was foolishness to call the throbbing in her temple love when she should know better. She is old enough: old enough to know how trouble comes. All naming a bedevilment and surprise. She is always surprised. The lines that have begun to mark her face these last few winters are arches across her forehead: She must have, more than any other impulse, frown, or squint, widened her eyes at the world she sees. Like an animal at the edge of the woods, stilled by a human scent, tail up, ears perked, eyes wide, whites showing. Call it alarm, fright—or wonder: Why not?
Peas inside a pod surprise her. She had not taken the peas off the fence before she and Edwin left for New York. That carelessness born of Samuel’s new wealth. It was no longer necessary. They hung there still for all she knew, many more unharvested than needed for seed alone, their tightly twisted vines inky dark, impenetrable as crabbed handwriting, more tenacious than she’d imagined. She had opened one velvety black pod—idly, a scientist now and not a farmer—while Edwin was hitching the horses, and had been surprised to find inside perfect pale-green peas, unharmed by rot, ready to plant come spring. There, without her vigilance. Unruined by her neglect. Samuel was right: Never had her gardens failed. But for that she was not due praise or blame or remarks on her charm across rivers. No gardener dares predict the harvest. So who is she to venture what is to be found, in the story she has carefully tended for so many years.
Jimmy Roberts could be inside the door, here. Now.
Would he recognize her? And if he did, would he be disappointed to see the difference sixteen years have wrought? Though surely he would at least honor what was. His boyhood would come back to him, and the places he’d left, and in her presence time compress to the thinnest line. His heart would skip and race, too; his head bent with dizziness, he would yank off his gloves from the need to do something—is that too much to imagine? He, too, might walk all the way to Union Square, and back down again nearly to Houston Street, just to screw up his courage to speak.
Mary, he would say.
She shivers at his voice on her name.
Is it really you? he would ask. After all these years?
Jimmy Roberts! she would reply (if words came). Imagine that, she would say, as though such imaginings had never before brought him to her side.
Every Past Thing Becomes Strange. That will be her first sentence in the green book. And then, as she has in her garden journals, she will describe and measure the constant rain of these afternoons she has spent walking alone down every street of lower Manhattan. The wide-ocean feeling at the very tip of the island: From here one can sail around the world. (How she would like to carry that air home with her.) The warmth of this strange November makes people stop to unbutton their coats, and pause to look at one another. With such weather, is any human story surprising?
The rain has drenched her, has caught the curls about her neck and pulled them straight, so that the wet dribbles down her neck, along her spine.
Why, in the middle of such a downpour, does she stand, looking heavenward?
As if—
Beseeching? Praying?
Neither, exactly.
Is it a gesture of relief, then?—like that of a child who, after carefully skirting a series of puddles, finally jumps in, trouble be damned.
Maybe. Yet what of the aspect of grief?
As she stands and looks up at the sky, Jimmy Roberts watches her. He must be. If he would be surprised to find her in his neighborhood, at least he would not find the extravagant gesture unfamiliar. That is the Mary I know, he would think, watching her drop her umbrella and turn her face to the sky. Were I to go close enough, she would let me pull a loose thread and unravel secrets and true things, not anything waste, not anything that would let me forget what I belong to (the sky, its fragments of star, the earth below). She might tell me about her girlhood game of grabbing bees in her fist to see how long she could hold them before they stung, or about collecting from the edge of the woods fiddlehead ferns before their unfurling, or about the Spanish singer whose picture her mother kept glued to the inside of her drawer of petticoats and stockings, or that grief and ecstasy are the same in time. And the things she says shift inside and remind him of the great sculptor he once watched work. Of the sharp metallic sound of his chisel and its stop at a tiny chunk of marble spinning off across the floor. She’d cared about what she let drop no more than the sculptor noticed those pebbles whizzing by him, and the commotion, all the visitors, all around.
Did she really share that same spirit, the same concentration, that same gathering in the center as Rodin? Jimmy Roberts had told her that. A silly thing to say.
Say that Jimmy Roberts was just a city dweller romanticizing Nature and one of her daughters. Say that his love (if that is its name) had not been tested by life. But even here, in gray tangling New York, weather surprises people. Love surprises. Thunderstorms come in November without warning. Here, more than he ever had in the country, Jimmy Roberts notices the people who live in accord with the weather, with rain and thunder, crying with the sky, hearts thudding as if to leap out of their casing. (And so forth, Nature all metaphor we need.) Irony, he thinks, that the inhabitants of those windowless, crowded rooms—that is how the reformers always write of them: thirty people, men women children, packed into one room without even a window—live most in the weather, its heat and its cold. Wet seeps through, spotting mold and drawing lines across the plaster walls, dripping puddles. Nature wins out—whether or not there’s a frame through which to watch it. But there will be time enough for him to tell more of that story, inside with her.
For wouldn’t he open the door and say, Shall we? And wouldn’t there be chairs for them to sit together? And a table for them to lean across? And years or hours for them to talk?
A trickle of rain has slipped all the way down her spine to her waist. She blinks and takes cover, leaning up against the building, under the awning, bending to withdraw a handkerchief from her bag.
Dare she?
It was all very well for Jimmy Roberts, but could she—did women do such things?—walk straight into Justus Schwab’s saloon?
Justus Schwab’s saloon was and was not the place the word suggests— cabbage stew and coffee could be had there, not just drink, and after Justus himself died of the tuberculosis in the winter of 1900, his wife (who, like Emerson, survived the disease that took the beloved) carried on for some years in exactly the same manner, until she and many of their friends grew too old for such work and such play.
This demise was yet in the future when