Authors: Emily Gray Tedrowe
Blue Stars
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To my brother
To an army wife, in Sardis:
Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars
of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.
—SAPPHO, “TO AN ARMY WIFE, IN SARDIS,” TRANSLATED BY MARY BARNARD
MADISON, WISCONSIN
JANUARY 2005
Ellen Silverman adjusted the cookbook stand so she could see the page in between bursts of chopping vegetables. Beneath the spattered plastic shield was a new collection of essays about Edith Wharton she was to review. (It had been years since she’d needed to refer to a cookbook.) Each time she scooped a handful of peelings and carried them to the garbage can Maisie, their twelve-year-old golden retriever, lifted her head to assess her chances, dropping it back to her paws when Ellen returned to the counter. Black bean chili sputtered on the stove, a chocolate torte from the bakery was in the fridge, and after the salad was finished all she had to do was set the dining room table. Her daughter Jane’s nineteenth birthday wasn’t until the end of next week, but since her son Wes would drive back to school tomorrow, they were celebrating tonight. It was good luck that Michael was also free. His motley jobs—snowplow driver, parking lot security, landscape worker—made for an unpredictable schedule.
The holidays were over, which was a relief. She would have time to read, to work. But this winter was a hard one, with two bad blizzards already. Even now there was a foot of new snow on the ground and more to come tonight. And the war in Iraq, brutal and pointless …
“Wharton’s famous
tableaux vivants
scene, in which Lily’s controlled stage fright rehearses the more intense fears to come, a cycle of terror revolving from loss of social status through loss of life—”
“Stage fright,” murmured Ellen, wiping the paring knife on her apron. “Stage fright? She’s happy as a clam, with everyone staring at her!” Maisie opened her eyes. Ellen leaned closer to the book, scanning the page. Hard to believe that a scholar (who was it, oh yes, the one from Iowa) could so mischaracterize one of
The House of Mirth
’s central scenes, even in a throwaway line unrelated to the essay’s larger point. Ellen lifted the lid on the chili. She opened and closed the refrigerator door. Then she laid a dish towel over the salad bowl and went up the stairs to her study.
For the first time in longer than Ellen cared to remember, after four books, countless articles, and numerous presentations focused on Edith Jones Wharton, there was no project of her own under way or on the horizon. She’d come to a stopping place. She needed to look around. Hence, this minor book review, a bit of busywork taken on while Ellen adjusted to the discomfort of her freedom.
Maybe I should find something else,
she thought, standing in the middle of her room,
someone other than Edith, to write about.
Unimaginable. She might as well become another person.
Ellen took down her reading copy, the compact off-white Penguin one (same as she’d owned as a girl) and found the right page even before she was seated in her armchair. Still in her apron, she read just enough to reassure herself that Lily was anything
but
nervous when she took her place in the gaudy party scene. Still, it was a potentially interesting notion—the idea that social fear and life-or-death fear were entwined, and often confused, within the novel’s various performances. Ellen made a note on a pad on the side table before flipping back a few pages, to enjoy Lily’s whirlwind preparations for the extravagant
tableaux.
Some time later, a rhythmic scraping drew her attention out of the book. Outside, a familiar figure was shoveling off the side stairs. Ellen watched her ward—the young man who used to be her ward—fling snow left and right over the metal railing, working his way down the buried stairs she hadn’t used in weeks. “Idiot,” she whispered, heart full. He knew she used the front door when it snowed this much, but he was shoveling for Maisie, who reliably trotted to this entrance morning and night, baffled each time that Ellen tugged her away to the front. Ellen rose to go but stayed to watch as a slighter figure crept up on Michael from behind. Her daughter Jane, long tangled hair spilling out from under a felt hat, scooped snow off the bushes and packed it hard. Just as she pulled back to throw, Michael turned to whip a shovelful right at her face. He’d faked not hearing her approach. Janey’s scream reached the rafters. She went to tackle Mike but he blocked her. Ellen watched for one more moment while he held her still, wiping snow from her face. Their laughter grew louder when she went downstairs and into the kitchen.
Now they’d let Maisie out, and she charged up and down the half-cleared stairs, deliriously. Jane grabbed the dog to give her a kiss and Michael wrestled her for a chance to pet Maisie. Ellen rushed over to the open door.
“You forgot to shut the door!” she shouted. Cold air along the kitchen floor. She blew kisses through the glass and mimed
come in, it’s freezing!
They waved back and then ignored her. Jane stuck a handful of snow down Michael’s collar; he lightly toppled her into a giant drift pile and then picked up the shovel.
Ellen pulled the door open a crack. “Don’t worry about that, just come in and get warm!”
“I was warm until your bratty daughter showed up.”
Jane pushed past him and flicked her snow-covered mittens his way. “Whiner.”
“Baby.”
“Suck-up.”
“Jane, your boots!” Ellen dragged her in to a towel on the floor and backed away from the spray of cold snow.
Michael stuck his lip out and pretended to shiver. Jane pounded the glass door and shouted, “Break’s over—get back to work! Earn your keep!”
“Jane!”
“What?” Laughing, her daughter toed off her snow boots and shrugged out of her soaking coat with Ellen’s help.
“Don’t say that to him.”
“Mom, relax.”
“Why would you say that?” Michael’s broad back, the muted scrape of his shovel.
“Mom! He knows I’m kidding. God, if there were any iota of truth to it, do you think I’d say it, even joking?” Jane twisted her hair into a rough knot and strode away, through the kitchen. Ellen held her dripping coat. Once again she wondered about the fault lines underneath the four of them. Michael was part of their family now, and had been for nearly five years—but even so … Did he feel, somehow, that he
had
to shovel the walk? Did a joke like Jane’s make him feel more welcome, or less? Did her own reaction make things worse, or worse in which ways?
Text and subtext.
Ellen hung up the coat and eyed Jane’s damp sock prints as she went over to stir the chili. As usual, birthday or not, she and her daughter were off on the wrong foot.
* * *
It was hard to say exactly when Michael Cacciarelli became one of them. Was it the day he and Ellen had the notary sign the forms for Wisconsin petition for guardianship? Was it before that, when he was crashing on the basement couch? The day she gave him a set of keys? When he began to leave grocery money, a wordless ten or twenty, magneted to the fridge? The night he allowed Ellen to take him to the ER for the cut above his eye, the one his aunt’s boyfriend gave him, the one that made him tell her everything?
Ellen’s son Wesley met Mike during the summer before his senior year in high school; he was seventeen, Mike sixteen. A friend of Ellen’s had gotten Wes a job with the city. It was a kind of youth program not really designed for bookish middle-class kids from the university neighborhood, but Ellen decided for reasons she couldn’t really remember now (fear she wasn’t exposing her son to more manly pursuits or the use of power tools at least) to sign him up. Wes gamely braved it all: the 5:00 a.m. honk of his crew outside; packing both a breakfast and lunch; and weathering what Ellen is sure must have been a fair amount of hassle from the rougher guys much more used to the work than slender, straight A’s Wesley. They laughed about it now, with Wes in his first year of U.Chicago’s graduate program for philosophy. But what had she been thinking?
“He’s a good guy, Mom.” That’s all Wes could tell her, once he started hanging out with this new Mike she began to hear so much about that summer:
Mike says, Mike once went to, Mike and I are going to …
But Ellen didn’t like it, Wes bolting dinner and hurrying to the beat-up two-seater idling at the curb. Where did they go?
Just drive around, get pizza.
Where does he live?
Like on Hammersley or something, over in the Southwest side.
And his parents?
I don’t
know,
Mom.
“So you’re worried about…” Her best friend Serena prompted. “Drinking, drugs?”
“No. I mean, maybe—but that’s more a Janey worry. It’s just … well, he’s never had a friend from a different school before!” Most of his Whitman friends were doing summer internships at the Capitol. “What was I thinking?”
“That you’d like him to make friends from different schools?” Serena had smiled gently, too kind to point out what they both understood: by “different school” Ellen meant “shitty neighborhood.” So yes, a great part of her confusion about this Mike Cacciarelli came from the fact that he lived in the Southwest, a gritty part of town featured regularly in the
Journal
’s articles on crime and racial tension. Ellen wasn’t sure what to do, if anything. Not for the first time, she wished she wasn’t alone in figuring it all out.
Her husband, Don, had died when the children were young. Why hadn’t she remarried? It was a question asked, in varying forms and tones, by friends and family occasionally over the years, or by one man or another who clearly thought he had earned the right. Even the kids, once they were old enough, would ask. Ellen’s answer—bright for friends and family, loving to her kids, stringent toward the man—was essentially the same. She had enough, in this life. Two lovely and complicated children, absorbing work, a creaky old house …