Stella Bain (24 page)

“I’m happy for you that you have your children back.”

“Your face is very beautiful,” she says, gazing at his handsome features.

“Etna,” he says with a laugh. “You were ever the optimist.”

“As I recall it,
you
were the optimist.”

“Maybe I was.”

“Has it been very terrible?” she asks.

“What, nine surgeries? Nothing to it.”

“Phillip.”

They are close to each other, knees to knees. She bends her head and lays her arms along his. She remains in that position—a supplicant? A penitent? A restless spirit wanting comfort?—until he raises her up.

“Etna,” he says, “you’re stronger than this.”

“Am I?”

“The pain has been difficult to deal with. There’s no point in pretending it hasn’t. But after the first several months, I became, in an odd way, accustomed to life here. It’s not without its pleasures.”

Etna cannot imagine what they are. “Do you have friends?” she asks.

“I do,” he says. He pauses. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“Of course.”

“Etna, I have someone.”

“Here?”

“Yes. A patient like myself.”

It takes Etna a few seconds to understand what Phillip is trying to tell her. And then she thinks, of course. Phillip collected beautiful things. He said he had once known love. He spoke of a beautiful man. Earlier, in America, he invented a fiancée. But mostly, it was in the way he was with Etna in France. He loved her, she knew, but without urgency.

She covers his hand. “I’m glad for you,” she says. “What’s his name?”

“William. I sometimes see on his face the same expression I once saw on yours so many years ago.”

The actual name impresses the reality upon her. She knows nothing of this kind of love.

“Did you guess?” he asks.

“No, but some things make sense now.”

“I once tried to tell you.”

“Do you still collect beautiful things?” she asks.

“I can’t,” he says. “There are too many of them here. Ruins the game.”

She laughs.

“Are
you
happy, Etna?”

“Yes, I think so. Yes, I am. I am so much better off than when I knew you in France.”

“When do you leave?”

“Soon.”

A shadow crosses his face. “But time enough for another visit?” he asks.

“Do you want me to come?”

“Of course I want you. I’m desperate for a fourth for bridge. William doesn’t play.”

“I’m sorry,” August says when Etna finds him in the lobby.

“He says he is content. He may even be happy.”

August shakes his head, bewildered.

“I felt sad for him, but he wasn’t sad,” she adds.

“At least there’s that.”

“It was important for me to visit him,” she explains.

“I didn’t understand until I saw the two of you together.”

Etna tilts her head. “How do you mean?”

“I mean I understand now why you have to be with him.”

Etna narrows her eyes. “You think I came to England for Phillip,” she says.

August stands perfectly still.

“I came to get
you,
” she whispers.

“I’m sorry?”

“You, August. I came to get you.”

“Etna, you surprise me,” he says.

“Are you really surprised?”

“My God.” He takes her hand and leads her along the corridor until he finds an empty room, well furnished, but of uncertain purpose. He embraces her and then pulls away to gaze at her. He draws her close and kisses her.

“After you left the Admiralty on the day Samuel said your name, I stumbled out of the building,” he says. “I dismissed Mary Dodsworth and decided to walk home in the rain. I couldn’t go to my clinic, and I certainly couldn’t go home to Lily. I especially could not do that.” He brings Etna to a pair of chairs near a window. When they sit, he leans toward her. “I was having trouble reconciling Stella with Etna. It seemed that Stella had died, which felt like a true death. And she did die, she did. But what hurt so deeply was that I would never know Etna. Never know her life, who she had been, who she would become. It was impossible to believe that I had lost two women in a matter of seconds in the Admiralty. I knew objectively the two women were one and the same, but that wasn’t how it felt. I understood that I knew Stella in a way no one ever would, and that despite my circumstances I had loved her. And now she had ceased to exist. I wandered in the rain, entered a pub, drank too much, went out again, and just walked. After a while, I found myself in one of those little gardens we were talking about. There was one iron bench, and I sat on it. And I wept.”

“August,” she says as she embraces him, pressing the side of her face into his. “I had no idea.”

For a moment, they are silent.

“When did you know you had feelings for me?” Etna asks.

“When I woke you from the nightmare. I told myself that what I felt was merely a desire to protect you, but we never had another meeting when I wasn’t aware of your exact physical proximity. When did you know?”

“When you asked me to draw my face. I remember I couldn’t, and I lay my head against the couch, and I thought you would kiss my neck. I wanted you to.” She puts her hand on August’s woolen sleeve. “We have time now to talk about these things,” she says, and as she does, a surge of feeling, not measured, not prepared for, travels from the center of her body to her mind—her own now, not injured, but rather bathed in the anticipation of a future with the man sitting so close to her.

“It’s unimaginable that Phillip should find love in such a place,” August says as they are leaving the building arm in arm. “Oh, Lord.”

“What?”

“The irony that Van Tassel should accuse Phillip of that particular crime!” August says with his free hand to his forehead.

“And Phillip couldn’t use the one thing that would exonerate him.”

“It’s a travesty.”

They walk together in silence.

“The pains in my legs threatened to come, but didn’t,” Etna tells him.

“I wondered about that. They didn’t come at all?”

“No. I was so relieved.”

“Has this ever happened to you before, that you thought they were coming, but they didn’t?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps they are gone?”

“I don’t know. Do you think, August, that the pains came because I ran away from Phillip? When I saw his injured face?”

“Possibly. But I think it’s probably more complicated than that. It seems more likely that they came because you
couldn’t
run away.”

“From Marne?”

“I’m thinking of your husband. You couldn’t run away for so many years, and then you did. From him, but also from your children. For which you must have had deep unconscious guilt when you were in Marne.”

“And then I ran from Phillip.”

“Yes.”

“Which was why I knew I had to see him again?” Etna asks.

“My God, Etna. I can hardly think,” he says, his voice full of emotion. “You and Parkhurst will have to work that out.”

The Austin speeds through a frosted countryside.

Etna reaches for August’s hand. She entwines her fingers and presses hard against his. He returns the pressure.

“I must go back,” Etna says. “I have to be with my children.”

“Would it be wrong of me to point out that there are schools in America where I can pursue my studies?” August asks, and she can hear the edge of excitement in his voice, an excitement she shares.

“It wouldn’t be wrong of you.”

“Etna, I have never been this happy.”

Despite Dodsworth’s presence up front, August kisses Etna, an awkward kiss with coats and hats and spectacles. When they break away, she laughs.

“Just wait until I get you alone,” he whispers.

She will not ask if he ever felt this way with Lily. That knowledge is not hers to have. It is enough—it is so much more than enough—that he is with her now.

He will be her one-room cottage, her oasis.

The Coast of New Hampshire, 1930

H
ow strange this happiness, the pain of it. Aware of minutes, she remembers years. She would remember every hour if she could. To live a life and then recall that life in equal time. What a thought! She wishes it could be done.

She slips off her smock, walks through the bedroom, and stands at the window. The water-sparkle blinds her. The sun just right, the tide moving at a rapid clip, a perfect June day. After lunch they will meander along the village lane and then walk out to the point where a house, vacant and abandoned, decomposes in the sea salt.

He has gone out for lobster but will return soon. She imagines him as he enters a shop she has been in a hundred times. He will take off his hat, and his hair will be creased in the back. He will raise a hand—that familiar gesture—and smooth the crown, missing the crease.

Sometimes she can see the scoliosis, one shoulder slightly higher than the other.

He will make a pleasantry, perhaps even a joke. He will twirl his hat on his finger. Henry Benedict, grocer, his large red hands planted squarely on the scarred wooden counter, will ask after her.

She opens the window and lets in the smell of fast-running seawater and sun-warmed stones. The shingled cottage is modest, the rooms small territories reclaimed in battle, the memory of that earlier cottage not as keenly felt, which makes memory possible.

When he returns from the grocer’s, he will touch her shoulder or her neck. He will talk to her of Henry Benedict, who writes his sums on a paper bag, whose shirt beneath the bloodstained apron is always beautifully pressed. Mrs. Benedict sews and irons behind a bombazine curtain, which occasionally emits a sullen boy, the son, carrying tinned peas or bananas.

Etna craves a banana now. She can taste the texture of the fruit, the gelatinous sweetness on the tongue. She will not ask August to go out again, though it is an errand he would gladly do.

Behind her stands the mahogany bed they purchased together in Boston. She has linen curtains at the windows, a Turkish carpet on the floor. Wallpaper covers the worn plaster.

Through the window, she can see the entire tide pool. The shifting shades of blue; the sea-grass green; no tinge of russet yet. The dock is big enough for a man’s fishing boat. Beside the cottage are others like it, and then the Benedicts’. Beyond that, the sea. In the afternoons, she has to hold her hand against the white sheet that is the ocean.

He will come in bareheaded, having removed his coat and hat downstairs. Perhaps his face will be pink with the fine weather and his exertion. He will tell her of how he met Stringfellow on his way home and how they talked of fishing. He will remember that Benedict asked after her.

On the dressing table, there are cut-glass jars of scents and pins. A knitted throw lies folded at the bottom of the chaise longue. She remembers yarn through her fingers, the pleasant surprise of cloth made from string. Of art made with a pencil. Her pictures now consist of oil paint on perfectly smooth canvas, the paintings as austere as architectural drawings, overpainted with less restrained splashes and lines of color. Blood red for field hospitals, blue for men who stand by iron gates in winter. Her love of color, the mixes, until the right shade of mauve or straw is achieved. The tension between the formality of the drawings and the release of color, the art. A different color each painting, bringing out a thought that might be missed.

He has put the two catalogs of her shows on her nightstand so that she might, if she wishes, peruse a life’s work. But
he
is her life’s work, she tries to tell him.
Her children
are her life’s work.
She
is her life’s work.

Clara will come soon with her girls. And Nicky, too, newly graduated from Dartmouth. And Sebastian, thirteen now, about to enter Exeter, the place where Etna’s father and Samuel used to teach. Sebastian is with them always, just off now with friends, learning how to sail.

After a visit with his father, Nicky will spend the summer with Etna and August on his way to Boston for law school. Etna never asks about his father, but she sometimes wonders if Van Tassel, who granted her a divorce in 1920, bemoans the loss of his family, which he abandoned as much as she. Or is he complacent, content to sit at his desk in his study in his home in Thrupp, pondering whom to hire and whom to fire?

Clara is a beauty, as predicted, her coloring fair, her lips full, her eyes, when suddenly presented, a surprise. She and her husband, Ned, live in Boston, his insurance company riding out the economic collapse.

In 1919, Etna was granted custody of Nicky on the condition that she would enter him in private school when he turned fourteen and that she would take him to church every Sunday. August loved the boy, and the boy in turn learned to love the man.

When was it she first moved to this seaside village? Eight years ago? She moved for the light, yes, but also to have a home for her family—this one not a secret, but hers nevertheless, bought with the labor of her hands.

She has always liked her windows clean. More often than not she climbs the ladder herself, learning to balance, newsprint in one hand, vinegar in the other. For this she has made a spectacle of herself. She is known as house-proud, a mantle she does not mind shouldering. Clarity is worth the sacrifice.

August will come soon. She knows this. He keeps a boat in the tide pool. They take it out for picnics.

Etna remembers her visit to the convalescent home in Kent in the winter of 1919. Samuel with his brotherly concern, Phillip with his secret, August with his bewilderment, and she with her guilt, finally assuaged that day. She held Phillip’s arms and bent her head and wanted to stay in that position for the rest of her life. But then Phillip lifted her up. She saw his living face as a beautiful thing. It showed a man who knew love. The tin mask was a caricature of life: they had painted a half mustache; the color of the eye was off.