A Dove of the East (15 page)

And a few minutes after four o'clock the steam whistle of the cutter thundered off the sand cliffs and echoed through all the cow meadows and wheatfields of the island. They stood, she sunburnt, lighted, and dizzy, yet calm. Then he left and ran through a field of hay and nettles onto the road.

He was very young when he died but he had been expecting it. He left her in that place, that island on the Maine coast, never to see her again. She grew to be very old. Her life was long, and even when old she was a comely and then a handsome woman. People wondered why, but she would never tell them. She died with the secret with which her younger man had died years before. Early one spring she heard a steam claxon beating like the wings of a bird over the island, and she saw a young man asking her name (she paused to think of the beauty she had been, how full of the sun, how blond, how strong, how womanly and alive) and, as he was leaving and had turned to run down the hill, she called out over the waves battering the shore, in the sun of long ago, Elizabeth Ridinoure.

T
HE WAR
was not even ended and many more were still to die when she had come over barley and gold plains to Beverley Station Saskatchewan and the English Benevolent Orphanage. She had had a big tag on her with routing instructions, and had been a long-distance Canadian Pacific passenger, traveling from Toronto into country she had not ever heard of or even imagined, since she was Dutch and only five years old. But even as a child she sensed the health and cleanliness of the plains, the pleasant heat, strong winds, and yellow sunshining days. There, was no war. It was untouched, quiet, thick, hot, and growing.

And the wonder had never passed, not in years of looking down a narrow heat-soaked road disappearing into a sea of golden wheat, of a vast windy blue sky with distant crows arched like eyebrows, of emptiness and ocean-like expanse laden with the richest, most intense summer colors. It was to her quite a miracle, a child of the waves come to land, the turmoil turned to quiet, chaos become the agitation of bees above the wheat. A childhood of cellars, attics, and sewers was thrust into the open height of the universe. This great difference, coming unknowing suddenly from the gray to blue and gold, had made her silent and grateful, had stunned her.

Since she had only confused memories of her life, with strong currents of vividness—of her parents, of when her father went out and did not return but was hunted down like an animal away from its burrow—she felt almost as if she had passed into another dimension, or had been moved in time. Even her clothes, because they were so torn and foul, had been taken away by the liberating troops. But they were of cloth her mother had sewed, and when a kindly foreign giant innocently threw them out after putting her into a brand-new pinafore, she felt again the way it was when her parents became lost to her.

Her father had been a jeweler, and from some silver cutlery he found in the warehouse, he made her a bracelet. “Anneka,” he said, “this you put on your arm, up here,” sliding it up her little arm, “and as you get bigger you put it down more and more until it comes to your wrist. And then you will know you are going to be a woman and are grown up, because you will not get bigger any more. I know this from many years of making bracelets for little girls.” He smiled, expecting that as in days before she would be happy—but children know, and she looked at him with a killing silence which in other circumstances would have been thickness but which was for then a too, too fine intelligence.

The English Benevolent Orphanage was a square of brick buildings around a courtyard. Each building had metal-covered roofs, lead-silver colored with white from the weather. In places the roofs came almost to the ground because the complex was built up against a little green hill, and Anneka took to the leaden metal as if it were a doll or a blanket. She always returned to it, and if she were missing, then Miss Wesley just went to where the roof met the hill and there was Anneka leaning against the smooth gray. Miss Wesley was unable to know that before coming to Canada the only place Anneka had ever seen sunshine was in the valley of a tin mansard roof on top of the warehouse, but Miss Wesley had understanding for silence and what it can say, since she herself had grown up in the midst of a great silent plain. So after a few weeks of fetching and re-fetching the little greeneyed blond girl from the back of the building, why the child returned always to the same spot suddenly dawned on her, and it showed in her face. When the child saw this she burst into tears, and the two rushed into one another's arms. And holding the little girl, Miss Wesley leaned against the metal, which they both touched with their fingers.

From then on Anneka was able to put things behind her. For as inevitably as the winter wheat, she had to grow. Miss Wesley had become her friend, and was quick to discover her intelligence and energy. Within a year she was speaking English fluently and excellently, and she astonished with her sense of ideas and process. Luckily there was a music instructor, and because of Anneka's quick grasp he provided her with a little cello. “Incredible,” he said to the headmistress, “she's incredible. These Jewish children take to stringed instruments so marvelously.” But you see it was not so incredible, for her mother had played the viola, and it had been the only music she knew, played quietly and slowly only on evenings when wind, rain, or snow could muffle the sound to outsiders. These became Anneka's favorite times for playing, in the evenings or at night in rain, wind, or snow.

The bracelet had descended to the wrist, and what a lovely wrist it was, of a lovely girl who was tall and thin and had dreams of music. She was very beautiful, the lush alert blondness of The Netherlands thinned and polished by northern winds and snow and ice on the plain. She had two years more of high school, which she was to continue in Toronto. And she had set her heart on the Juilliard School of Music in New York after that. It was spring. The weather had not yet turned and was wet and promising. She was in the music room with the little children, teaching them with tom-toms and triangles, and thick sticks painted red. She was at the piano, her sheepskin jacket thrown over her shoulders. She wore her schoolgirl's uniform, a white blouse and blue and green plaid skirt. Rain was wetting the window panes. Beyond, the snow had melted over most of a field littered with straws and steins. It was just before five o'clock and dinner, the least lonely time of the day, which she knew well from her years there was the best time to get the children interested, and so she banged the piano and sang loudly (somewhat affectedly, in a strangely English accent for Beverley Station), for she loved these children and wanted them to be interested in music—if not as she was, then at least so they could carve a mother or father from the objective world, as was so often done in that place.

When she finished, a girl came in and said that the headmistress had asked to see her. “What for?” said Anneka.

“I have no idea,” answered the girl, “but you'd better hurry since you have to do tables tonight.” Anneka put her music in the piano bench and went out into the hall. The headmistress was a woman who stood before the assembled children, her hands quivering, to lecture on courage and decency—qualities she believed orphans needed more than others to survive in a world where, she counseled them, events and circumstance were forever tearing men and women apart. Sometimes she spoke on this and other themes for an hour or more, looking out the blue windows at a snow-laden sky, forgetful that little girls were arrayed before her. And sometimes she did things they did not understand, as if something invisible had taken hold of her. She might for example suddenly stand in the dining room and berate the happy eaters about their lack of manners and their “disgustingness.” This was like a sudden windstorm which came up from nowhere and then just died down. What a terrible sadness it was, for the older girls, to have to fight her. They knew that she would always be there in the place for which they felt affection only because by some good grace they quickly grew and left it. Anneka had been accepted at the school in Toronto, and as she made her way to the headmistress she felt wary only of her own power.

She entered the office of the headmistress, an elegant room, a study and a parlor at the same time. The headmistress stared directly at her from behind an oaken desk. Anneka could see through the leaded glass window a V of wild geese veering toward the West and a gray cloud. The headmistress wore black gloves. Her hands clasped delicately together looked like a monkey. A fire burned in the fireplace making the room hot and dry.

“Anneka,” she began, “you are one of our best girls—a good student, an excellent musician. In May you will be leaving us for Toronto. Have you read the information about the school which I asked Miss Wesley to give you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” answered Anneka.

“Well then, did you come across the dress regulations?”

“Yes.”

“And did you see that,” and she picked up a piece of paper and read, “girls shall not wear jewelry of any kind.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Anneka, feeling helpless and hurt.

“This institution,” said the headmistress, “exists for the benefit of all who enter, and that includes those who have yet to come. We must comply with the rules of other institutions with which we have close relationships. I certainly cannot allow one of our girls to leave here while perpetrating an infraction of the rules of a school which has accepted her.” She smiled, and then said, “I am afraid, Anneka, that you must remove your bracelet. Our reputation rides upon it.”

“No,” answered the girl, terrified.

“What do you mean ‘no'? I have explained, haven't I, why this is necessary?”

“Yes you have, ma'am.”

“Then what is your answer?”

“No,” she said, “I can't.” She was visibly shaking.

“Well then,” said the headmistress, “I will have to write to the school and withdraw our recommendation. You give me no choice at all.”

The school meant everything to Anneka. Where else could she go? It was music which made her life a life of love. She had felt so strong, only to be shown in an instant that she was indeed very weak. But she would not cut her bracelet. So many times she had kissed it, and held it with her left hand as she slept. So many times she had held it to her breast.

Terribly frightened, the headmistress stood up at her desk, holding a wire-cutting pliers. “Don't cut it,” said Anneka gently and sadly, as the headmistress approached, opening and closing the unfamiliar instrument. “Don't cut it,” she said—passive, broken, and then full of silent tears. The headmistress put the bracelet in between the heads of the pliers, and with a soft clip, it was severed from her wrist. Anneka sat crying with not a sound, her face red and swollen, her eyes almost unable to see.

Anneka left the room and went down the hall, guiding herself by placing her hand against the wall and feeling the wooden coat-pegs. Everyone was having dinner. She went to the music room and sat on the piano bench staring out the window at night falling over the fields. It was cold and wet outside, blue-black, like a late November afternoon when hunters go home. She raised her head and looked into the darkness. Her tears were dry, and she was very still, whispering to herself, What have I done to you, my Papa, what have I done?

W
ITHOUT SACRIFICE
the world would be nothing. There are cardinal principles by which we grow, and we blend them together with the energy afforded us and the enthusiasm at our disposal for the result which is our life. These were the thoughts she was thinking while she was thinking, Where do I go from here? It seemed for the first time as if her direction were really important, for this time it was not learning, and not condoned, but truly her own. No one was watching and nothing was expected. It was simply her life, a life started in the era of rebellion and played that way to the full so that even she was embarrassed by its excess. Underneath, though, she knew she would come through, even if she felt lost and lonely, looking for a way to vent the passion she was afraid had vanished.

Her husband was a painter who painted her. In the latest painting she was standing in a white dress by a white marble fireplace. She could not imagine how he had managed that perfect and balanced fireplace, for in the Virginia countryside where they lived they had nothing like it. Both their families were Washington families, in government. Both had lived graceful lives and been trained with thorough severity in great halls. They were precise. He could produce a rejoinder which made an adversary feel like a fox flushed from a hole. He could shame his enemies, and she inspired impossible longing in most men who saw her, even in the paintings, which were painted with strength and ferocity. They were sure the world would take notice. It did not. They worried, for he was a fine painter and engraved his principles into his paintings in great depth.

He painted her in a white dress standing by a marble mantel of his memory; her face was beautiful and contained, framed by soft red hair and small eyebrows. She was clearly the wife of the painter. Even had she been only his model and his wife were somewhere else she would have gained the true title, for with the love he used to paint her he had effectively married. She was his wife, her every footstep to him something to love, a true love intent upon concert so specific and intense that it could be shown only in a painting of skillful black and defeating white amidst the red smile of his red-haired wife.

He painted her there with flowers, for flowers were something he could also paint. Her pleading was no success and he had allowed her to compete with flowers. She had looked at them during the painting. They changed, they died, but she looked at them throughout. They were flowers from the fields she was walking through, in the midst of an early summer which as setting for dreams is preserved in stormy winters and seasons of emptiness.