The Celestials (35 page)

Alfred was already returned, working as a slater for the Wilburns, and it was by way of him that she finally came to understand those feelings of Charlie's by her own example. Shortly after her return, Alfred spent several weeks reslating their barn. He spent much of his time on the steeply pitched roof watching her move around below. His attentions caused her shame. It was no longer necessary to curry his favor, but to avoid her fear that she was the kind of person who took what she needed and then moved on, she gave him more attention than she might have. He endured her brothers' teasing and her impatience, and his stoicism made her think that perhaps she had underestimated him. During those weeks of slating, she stopped one day and tilted her face up to him, and he smiled, surprised and pleased to be noticed, and gave her a little wave. And she saw that he was a good man, but not a good man for her.

*

From the depot, Charlie set out for Lucy Robinson's place, but he knew she was spending most of her days at the Sampson apartment, and the thought of entering empty rooms not his own brushed him with sadness, so he turned in the other direction and headed for the factory.

The last of the Chinese workers had quit the business and the town over thirteen years previous, and most likely he was the only Celestial now walking the streets. He recalled bits from the
Transcript
article that Lucy had mailed to him. The headline read, “Departure of the Chinese.” The workers were called “almond-eyed children of the Sun,” and their ten-year stay described as “an orderly and unmolested life, quiet to an extreme degree.” One phrase he had turned over in his mind in the years since came to him again as he stood before the familiar fence and red brick of the wide south wall: “And so as the time of the Chinese expired . . .” As if someone had known when they'd arrived that their time would be limited in advance by forces other than themselves. He remembered telling Ida when he first read the article that it was as if he had died but had not known it.

She had told him that he was more alive than he had ever been while in that factory. And he believed her, and did not share his lingering worries that perhaps to have given up his first people, his first world, was to have given up too much.

Shortly after the New Year in 1878, Julia took Alice on an afternoon excursion. They took the stage to Pittsfield,
then walked several blocks to the unassuming studio of a fledgling photographer named Whitmore. Alice was accustomed to being her mother's near-constant companion on all assortments of outings, but they had never sat for a photograph before, and her mother had taken even more care with their attire than she usually did. Julia wore her most somber dress of black silk. Her collar was white, the bow at her neck a dark green velvet. The dress's sleeves were gathered in tight pleats at the wrist, the rest of the sleeve draping so as to leave the shape of her arms to the imagination. The dress's skirt was wide and full, obscuring the upholstered chair upon which she sat.

Alice sat in her mother's lap, wearing a white eyelet dress trimmed in white lace, polished black boots, and a plain white bonnet. She had not wanted to be held on her mother's lap, maintaining that she was big enough to stand, or even to have her own chair, but her mother had insisted and Alice would rarely be the kind of daughter to refuse her mother direct. She was by this point an uncommonly serious child, and though she had no idea why she had been brought to a place such as this one, she trusted her mother, and so she sat as told, still as the sky, watching the man disappear behind his giant machine that looked, she told her mother on the return stage, like a bug. She liked bugs.

In the photo, Alice's eyes appeared as black as they were in life. Julia's eyes appeared, as blue eyes always did in those early days of photography, white, and had Mr. Whitmore not colored the irises blue, her appearance would've been startling. The child regarded her mother, and although
Julia looked toward the camera, there was something in her expression that suggested the strain of holding her eyes where they least wanted to be.

The print, which she had delivered to Charlie, snapped his heart like brittle bone, suggesting as it did that although Julia was holding the viewer in her gaze, she was not holding him in her heart or mind. As a response to the portrait he had made for her, it was, for Charlie, a devastation. It made clear, once and for all, that her eyes would always and forever be in motion, seeking out those of her daughter, with neither the attention nor the inclination for any other pursuit.

He had therefore, at Lucy's suggestion, turned to Virginia. There was mining to be done in Virginia—hadn't he done that long ago in California? Ida's aunt ran an affordable boardinghouse with clean rooms and good food. He might not know the place, but he knew someone in it. He had even discussed the matter with Sampson, who had urged him to go. Had Charlie thought that he would remain in North Adams for all his days? It was time for him to make his way in the world like a true American. Sampson bade him well.

By February of 1878, Charlie had gone, and by midsummer, he and Ida had wed. He did not feel her to be a consolation prize. He felt, as he tried to make clear to her, that someone had taken his face between soft hands, turned it from the window through which he had been looking for so long, and said, merely,
Look. Over here. There is much to be seen
. The fact that he had not looked in this direction before,
he told her on the night before their wedding, was the fault of the viewer, not the view.

At the small Baptist church that she had first attended as an infant in her mother's arms, she and Charlie stood before God and her family, and Ida marveled at her lack of nerves. Truly, she thought, she had never known a man like this one.

Alfred was witness to the marriage. He stood in the last row of the airless one-room church barely able to contain his gall at her choice. And so Charlie was glad, when he and Ida decided to move back North—to escape her still-angry family for what they hoped would be the more tolerant anonymity of New York—to be leaving Alfred behind.

Lucy, too, had been to the wedding, and seeing her there sharing space with Charlie in God's small room had settled something for Ida, and she had felt lucky to have them both in the world.

In the early going, Charlie had been so sensitive to Ida's anxieties that he had imagined his feelings for Julia written in bold characters on a long scroll and rolled tight, tied in red thread, and sealed with wax. It had given Ida and him enough space to find the materials to build their own kind of happiness, and although in the structure they made, Julia's absence was always for him like a boarded-up window, it was nonetheless a place of sturdiness, filled with both warmth and breezes and many clean rooms.

It was only after Ida and he had been confident of each other for many years, after they had been able to speak of North Adams and their time there, that he had relaxed his
vigil, and the scroll began to unroll as if someone's large hand had given it a small push down a long table, and Julia came leaping from the paper as if she had never left. And he imagined both women in the same crowded room, pushing against whatever pushed back. He told Ida almost everything. He did not say he was the girl's father, but he did not feel he had to say such a thing for it to be the truth between them. He did not tell her how often he continued to think of Julia and Alice. These thoughts, he knew, did not detract from his strong feelings for Ida and their own children. Because he could not explain this phenomenon fully to himself, he chose not to attempt to explain it to her.

Alice had, of course, been there throughout. She had, according to bits and pieces from Lucy's letters, turned out to be a straightforward and reserved child. She had a tendency toward moodiness, and was sometimes dramatic in unexpected ways. Once, Lucy had written, as a nine-year-old, the child had cried when they replaced one carriage with a new one. A mention in one of Lucy's letters of something she had said or done could buoy him for days, and omissions of such details left him bereft and irritated, and on days such as those, Ida and their children had learned to move with the quiet of spiders, making their own happinesses. Though he near constantly considered asking Ida to seek news of the girl from Lucy, he considered it more strongly at times such as these, but the pain he knew such a request would cause kept him from making his deliberations a reality.

He wondered as to Alice's developing appearance. He imagined he could predict her passions and sadnesses. He
flew on fantasies such as these until his wings tired with the knowledge that all these things would never be his to see. How could he know what made her smile when he could not even know her smile? And then he would plague himself with questions: Were her teeth small or gapped? What were the lengths of her fingers? Did she suffer from headaches? Did she suffer at all? And most of all, what did she know of her father? He imagined Julia storing her secrets away, doling them out piece by piece, or saving them up to hand to her daughter at some point in one spectacular flourish. His largest fear was that there would be no doling or flourish, just year after year of silence.

The factory's windows were dark and empty. The doors were bolted. He climbed over the fence and walked the gravel path to what had been their entrance. The temperature had dropped. He put his face to the nearest window, but all was dark, and he could not see what now went on in those rooms.

On Wednesday evening, Fannie Burlingame arrived at the Wilson House apartment to pay her respects and say her farewells to Cousin Calvin. When she reappeared from Sampson's chambers, she was dry-eyed and brisk, and Alice rose from the window seat to escort her aged cousin to the door.

Alice had never felt comfortable around Fannie. There was nothing she could point to as hard evidence of her cousin's disapproval, but she felt it nonetheless, the same way she felt small dips in conversation sometimes, as if a
soft spot had been discovered, the ground almost giving way. The town thought Fannie an odd duck. She had adopted a Celestial boy. She had never married.

Alice held the door open and waited for Fannie to pull on her gloves. The old woman regarded her. “This has been hard on you, I imagine,” Fannie said.

Alice had heard something similar from just about every visitor to the Wilson House that week. “It is harder, I'm sure, on my parents,” she said. “I am trying to be a help. And, of course, we have Lucy. She's been quite wonderful.”

Fannie fastened her cloak at her neck. “What word do you have from your father?” she asked.

Alice stared at her, confused. “So sorry,” she said, “but I'm not sure what you mean. You yourself have just seen my father.”

Fannie looked neither surprised nor chagrined. In fact, Alice could not remember her studying her with more kindness. Fannie patted Alice's hand and apologized. She was old, she said. Alice must forgive her, she added, and then she kissed Alice on the forehead and left.

At seven, twelve, sixteen, Alice had been much the same person as she had been at one, three, and five. Likewise, at twenty, what she knew, she knew because she had been told, not because she had inquired. If she had made a written record of what she knew about her parents, it would read like an index or endnotes. She knew, of course, of her father's Chinese Experiment. She had the sense, even as a child, that any subsequent failures or successes were measured against that first
unprecedented event. The Chinese had left and Sampson had persevered, yet he had lost significant monies in other business ventures. Alice remembered hushed, anxious conversations between her parents behind closed doors. When she was fourteen, the Millard factory sole stitchers staged a walkout, the first shoe strike since the Celestials' arrival seventeen years previous. That same year, her father retired, the business sold to Chase. Her father had been melancholy for weeks after his retirement, and Julia had told Alice that they must do what they could to cheer him. Alice had been unable to think of what talents she might possess that her father would find worthwhile, and so she had spent some hours sitting across from him doing her lessons, occasionally asking him for help though she needed none.

So it was unlike her now, as a twenty-year-old, to edge into her mother's dressing room, open the armoire, and draw from the bottom shelf the leather valise that accompanied her mother wherever she went. Alice had spent her life watching this valise be moved from carriage to train, train to carriage, one bottom shelf to another, but until now, it had never occurred to her to ask about its contents let alone see for herself.

She took the case into her own room and locked the door behind her. The leather was worn, lovely to the touch, and as the lock sprang open, Alice noted how easy behavior such as this was and marveled at her never having engaged in it before.

Having had no expectations for the contents of the case, she was equally and pleasantly surprised at it all. A
handkerchief clumsily embroidered with her mother's initials and her wedding date. Letters from the Baptist church that Alice didn't bother to read. A rock with a white band around it. Mementos of Alice's life: a lock from her first haircut, her first tooth, a portrait of mother and daughter that Alice remembered sitting for. A carved wooden dragon. A mahogany hairpin. Tucked into one corner, wrapped in muslin, a small pair of black cloth baby shoes. Her own, Alice assumed, but she didn't remember wearing them.

At the sounds of Lucy moving past her bedroom door, Alice shut the case and slipped it under her bed. No one would miss it now, and she resolved to return to it later when she had more time.