The Edge of the Earth (8 page)

And so, as my mother said, I ruined everything.

CHAPTER 7

O
UR FIRST BREAKFAST
at Point Lucia was pilot bread, which turned out to be hard enough to break a tooth on. Dipping it in coffee would have helped, but the beans Mrs. Crawley had given me were green, and even supposing I’d had the stove lit and could figure out which apparatus was meant to be a roaster, I’d not have had them browned, ground, and boiled before noon.

“I’m afraid it’s not a very good first meal.”

“Never mind.” Oskar swallowed his down. “You’ll figure it out.” And then he was standing again, pushing his hat onto his head. “Best not be late.”

I followed him to the door. I didn’t want to call him back; I believed that I’d a duty not to, but I felt a sort of panic rise in my throat and couldn’t help myself. “Oskar!”

“Yes?”

“But . . . well . . . what should I do today?”

“Oh.” He smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find something.” He kissed me cheerfully, stepped into the cold, damp air, and was gone.

The dawn had just begun to gray the kitchen. I knew the place needed cleaning badly, but it was too dark to attempt it. I turned down the lamp and went back up the stairs, aware with every chilly step that I now lived in a pile of stone, perched at the top of a rock, hanging over the sea. The pulse of the ocean penetrated the windows—or it may have been my heart sounding in my ears—and in time to it, I found myself repeating Mrs. Crawley’s words: “No one comes here. No one comes here.” How different this morning would have been on Tenth Street, I thought as I got back into bed. Gustina would have hulled strawberries at the sink while my mother set the table with the bone plates and the bird’s-eye napkins embroidered with cherries. She would polish the silver forks with the hem of her apron before she laid them on, too. And then she would put her head into the back staircase—“Felix! Was ist los?”—because always he was slower to come down than she thought he ought to be, and I slower still, except that now I wasn’t there at all. It seemed likely that I would never be there again, when I thought of the ships and trains, the many nights in unfamiliar beds, that intervened between that life and this.

The sheets, when I pressed my face to them, still smelled like home. Through the wall, I could hear Mr. Johnston calling gibberish in his sleep.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Missus! Missus!” The children were clamoring for me. Was I expected to begin their schooling already?

The sun must have risen, but the sky remained gray. I scrambled from the blankets and hurried downstairs. All four stood at my door, mussed and grubby, as if it were the end of the day rather than the start. The oldest boy had a rucksack strapped on his back.

They stared at me. “Were you sleeping?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“But it’s half past seven.”

“Your milk and eggs have been here for ages.”

“Did you sleep in your clothes?”

They were all talking at once, and I didn’t know whom to answer or, in any case, what to say.

“We’re going to the beach!” Jane said finally.

“We thought you might like to go with us,” Mary added.

I hesitated. “Maybe we ought to begin your lessons.”

“Not today!” the younger boy exclaimed with real dismay in his face. I remembered that his name was Nicholas.

“I suppose that can wait.” I looked back over my shoulder. “But our house is so dirty. I ought to clean it.”

To this they said nothing for a moment. Then Nicholas said again, boldly, “Not today!”

They looked at me, waiting to find out whether I would scold him for impudence and shoo them away. “All right, today I’ll come with you. Why not?”

As a child, I’d cooled myself on many a hot summer’s day by walking between the rows of heavy, wet sheets on the clothesline behind our house. Moving through the fog that hung around the rock felt much the same, though there was no freshly washed scent and no sun at the end to warm and dry us. The closest building, the workshop, was a dark, indistinct form. Possibly, the denser patch of gray beyond that was the barn. The lighthouse itself, farther down the path, was only a suggestion of something more solid than air. I expected the children to lead me to the little steam-driven platform on which Oskar and I had been carried up the morro the previous afternoon, but instead they launched themselves off the northern edge of the rock, directly into the clouds.

I shrank back. The descent was shockingly steep, although, perhaps mercifully, the extent of the slope beyond the first ten feet was so heavily shrouded that it was impossible to judge. What ground I could see consisted of sharp-edged brown and black rocks, each surface scored and cracked, as if some giant had attempted and failed to sculpt this matter into some graceful form. Hard and brutish as the materials were, however, the effect overall was not ugly. The rocks were covered with vegetation exotic to my eye. Orange and green lichens spread in a bright, haphazard patchwork, and plants in various greens and grays, even a few with flowers, clung defiantly to the cracks.

I picked my way cautiously, but at every few steps, my feet failed to find a purchase, and I slid until I could grab enough of the low, brittle plants to stop my fall.

“Is there a path?” I called into the grayness. “Should I be following a path?”

“No path.” It was Edward who answered. “Best to zigzag.”

“Yes, don’t try to go straight down.” That was Mary’s voice.

“You’ll kill yourself!” shouted Nicholas.

“Wait for me!” demanded Jane. “Ma says you have to wait for me!”

There was much sliding and scraping and clattering, and from time to time I spotted Jane’s red sweater, but even that very little girl was moving faster than I was. I placed my feet with no notion of where I was going except down, fearing with every step that the ground might disappear entirely. Then, suddenly, the fog thinned. We’d come through the bottom of the cloud. I could see the children, Edward and Mary, sure-footed, in front; Nicholas, accepting the occasional slide on his bottom as the price of not falling behind; and Jane, who just then lost her footing and began sliding fast, rolling onto her stomach, but otherwise abandoning herself to the force of the slope.

I nearly screamed and let myself slide as fast as I dared without completely losing control, my feet turned sideways to the mountain. The older children looked up and moved to stop the little one’s fall, but in the end, it wasn’t necessary. A dense shrub caught her, and she lay until I could reach her and pull her onto my lap. I let her cry and dabbed at her scrapes with my sleeve.

“She’s all right,” I called down, but the others had gone on already.

I sat for a while, the child snuffling in my skirt, and wondered how we would manage to climb up again. Now that I was sitting still and could raise my eyes from the rough ground, and now that the sound of scraping shoes against the crumbling dirt no longer filled my ears, I became aware of the breaking waves. They were more violent today than yesterday, and they hurled themselves toward the rocks that shattered them into a million droplets. The waters I knew, the Great Lake and the Milwaukee River, were gray and stately, green and sluggish, respectively. This was wild, churning stuff, its turquoise color as extravagant as its movements.

The three older children had shed their shoes and stockings by the time Jane and I reached the bottom. Mary was tucking her skirt into her bloomers. I admired their unself-consciousness and their ease with the rough surf. They ventured in as the sea gathered itself and then ran, shrieking, from the tongues of cold water, like the quick-legged shore birds, although the birds were silent and serious. I followed the children onto an outcropping of rock and watched them squat over a clear saltwater pool, their shadows frightening crabs, which ducked nimbly under rocks. The bottom of the pool was lined with bright orange and brick-red starfish and even one of brilliant blue; small dark shells, whorled into points, like the budding flowers of an apple tree; tiny volcanoes from which waved frondlike tongues; pale green anemones that curled around the children’s insistent poking fingers; columns of black mussels.

“Look!” Nicholas cried. With a bit of shell, he was teasing a bright pink blob off a rock. “I’ve never seen one like this!”

The others crowded around, squinting critically.

“I have,” Edward boasted.

“You have not!”

“I have, too.”

“Don’t touch it!” I cried.

They all turned to look at me in astonishment.

“Why not?” Nicholas asked at last.

“It might bite or sting. It might be poisonous.”

“It’s not. See?” Nicholas had loosened the animal’s grip on the rock. He plucked it off and held it up. Without its base to support it, it hung limply between his finger and thumb.

“What is it?” I asked. “Some sort of slug?”

“It’s not a slug! It’s a nudibranch!” Nicholas said, affronted. “And we’ve never found one this color before.”

“Nicholas is right, Edward,” Mary said. “I think we ought to keep it.”

“What’s a . . . what did you call it?” I asked.

“A nudibranch,” Mary said.

“Is that a name you made up?”

“Of course not!” Edward said indignantly. “It’s in the book.”

“Some Species of the Pacific Coast,” Mary explained.

“Mary stole it out of the library!” Jane said gleefully.

“I didn’t steal it,” Mary said. “I put something else in its place. That’s allowed.”

“Well, I’m keeping this!” Nicholas took a jar out of the rucksack, filled it with seawater, and dropped the animal inside it.

∗ ∗ ∗

They splashed about in the water, sometimes scooping other animals into jars, sometimes dropping items straight into the rucksack—a bit of bone, for instance, and several rocks imprinted with ancient shells and bored through by worms. They pointed out dolphins’ fins cutting through the waves and the dark bodies of seals lolling on the rocks.

It was tempting to pick up bits of sea life and look at them more closely once I saw they were harmless. The water itself seemed to bite my feet, however, as I stepped into the icy pool, reaching for a mother-of-pearl shell and a bright red star. I peeled off my boots and stockings and picked my way over the rocks and sand in my naked feet, no different from the children.

In an hour or two, we were eating pilot bread, thickly sugared with sand, that Edward had fished out of the bottom of the rucksack for our lunch. Although the air was clear enough immediately around us, a haze obscured everything beyond a hundred yards. One minute I was looking at nothing, and the next a dark shape emerged from the north, striding vigorously. The children followed my gaze.

“Mama!” Janie cried, jumping up and running toward the woman.

Indeed, it was Mrs. Crawley.

“What are you doing down here?” she said when she was near enough for normal conversation. Her voice was sharp, although she allowed Jane to swing her arm playfully.

I’d thought to ask the same of her, although I certainly wouldn’t have used that tone. “The children were showing me—” I began.

“They know better than to go down to the beach without permission, Mrs. Swann.”

“But you never give permission,” Edward complained.

“That’s because there’s plenty for you to do up top. I doubt any of you have finished your chores. And I’m quite sure,” she added, “that Mrs. Swann has a great deal of work to do around her own house.”

In a moment, the children had tossed their shoes into the rucksack and were scrambling straight up the forbidding, rocky wall, using both hands and feet; even Edward, dragging the full pack, moved quickly. I struggled awkwardly to pull my stockings over my own sandy feet and to thrust my feet into my shoes while Mrs. Crawley stood over me. Somewhat composed at last, I took a few steps toward the path the children had taken, keenly aware of my constricting corset and heavy skirt.

“We can take the steam donkey,” Mrs. Crawley said.

It was a long, silent walk to the platform on the east side of the morro, and soon enough I wished that I’d scrambled after the children. I tried to make conversation, although I was rather breathless from having to keep up a near trot to match Mrs. Crawley’s pace.

“Did you walk far?” I asked.

“What do you consider far?”

Her tone wasn’t friendly, and I faltered in my answer. “Oh, more than a mile, I suppose.”

“Then yes.”

“It must be an excellent means of exercise,” I chirped.

Since we’d begun our walk, she hadn’t turned her face in my direction. Now she stared at me. “I don’t require exercise.”

Clearly, I’d gone wrong and I tried to explain myself. “It’s so different here from Milwaukee.” There you could take a streetcar to the beach and buy lemonade from a stand with a striped awning.

“Yes,” she said. “Obviously.”

“The children showed me so many interesting things,” I pressed on. “They have a wonderful sense of curiosity, you know.”

Finally, we reached the steam donkey. She threw a log or two into its boiler and reached out a hand to help me aboard. The car began to move before I had my footing, and her fingers closed around mine as she pulled me toward her to keep me from tipping off the platform.

“Curiosity,” she said, her voice near my ear so I could hear her over the chugging engine, “isn’t necessarily a virtue here.”

At the top, she whisked away, and there was nothing left for me but to go into my dark house, where a dirty plate littered with the remains of Oskar’s lunch—more pilot bread—lay on the kitchen table. There was a note beside it, written across a thick sheet of paper torn from my sketchbook.

Dear Mrs. Swann,

Will you have dinner with me tonight?

Your love,

Mr. Swann

CHAPTER 8

T
HE MONTHS BETWEEN
Oskar’s declaration and my becoming Mrs. Swann were riddled with the anger of those whom we’d disappointed with our plans, but this served only to heighten our passion and resolve. Like countless others before us, we believed that we alone understood the dictates of love.

Though Oskar was perhaps none too delicate when he announced his reason for moving out of the Dettweilers’ house and into a Polish boarding establishment on the south side of town, I admired his courage and purposefulness.

Less stalwart, I wept at the hurt I caused my childhood friend.

“It’s only a fancy,” Ernst repeated several times. “I’m sure of it.” He turned his back on me and set his face toward the rain-soaked street outside his parents’ parlor. His fingers worked so ferociously, polishing the lenses of his spectacles, that I feared his handkerchief would fill with broken glass.

In the end, he clasped me to him, and I briefly yearned to belong in that snug space between his broad chest and pinioning arms, for my sake as well as his, but at last I couldn’t draw breath with my face pressed against the soft wool of his jacket, and I pushed myself free.

“I must go. I’m so sorry, Ernst.”

“You must go?” His voice was mocking as he sniffed and curled the earpieces of his glasses into place in a gesture I knew as well as the shape of my own thumb. “You’re not compelled to do anything. You’re choosing this, and you’re an ingrate and a fool to do it.”

I was grateful to him for this, because being angry in return was easier than feeling sorry. Even more assuaging to my emotions was the black eye Ernst gave Oskar the following day.

“I didn’t put up any fight,” Oskar assured me. “I owed it to him to stand still and take whatever he wanted to give me.”

∗ ∗ ∗

“I understand that you love him,” my mother said. She was sitting at her vanity table, letting me brush out her hair with her silver-backed brush, a task that had always encouraged our confidences, perhaps because we didn’t have to look directly at each other as we spoke or because the gentle stroking silently communicated some necessary reassurance. “I understand that you love him,” she repeated, underlining the sentence with her finger on the burled wood of the tabletop. “And there is nothing to be done about that. But your father and I worry that he seems to care so much about what he’ll do, what he’ll achieve, no matter what it might cost someone else.”

“Why do you say that?” I sought her eyes in the glass.

“Martha told me that he nearly ruined her sister.”

“His mother?” I was used to hearing about Martha’s sister’s delicate emotions.

“No, they have an older sister, a maiden lady. Her name is Ida.”

“I don’t see how he could have harmed her,” I said indignantly.

As my mother told me the story that Martha had told her, I studied her hair, which gently resisted the boar’s bristles I was pulling through it. Gray strands stood out among the brown.

“It seems Oskar had the idea a few years ago to extend the life of the electric lightbulb. Or maybe to make it brighter. Something like that. Anyway, Ida had lent Oskar’s brother some money for a project of his, so it seemed only fair to do the same for Oskar, especially when he seemed so sure of this scheme. That’s what upset Martha, that he behaved as if he knew what he was doing, when he’d had hardly any training at all for that sort of thing. A class on mechanical science at Oberlin. A conversation with some visiting so-and-so. He got carried away, Martha says. He convinced Ida to give him more and more money, a great deal in the end, and then he gave it all up as a failure. Martha says her sister is greatly reduced and she believes worry over money has affected Ida’s health.”

This wasn’t pleasant to hear, but I wasn’t dismayed. The Dettweilers were understandably angry with Oskar—and with me—for disappointing Ernst. It wasn’t surprising that they looked for ways to judge him harshly.

“I’ve no doubt that Ida did lose money,” I said, meeting my mother’s gaze squarely in the glass again, “but from all you say, it’s clear that it was freely given and that Oskar used it sincerely for his work. All scientists fail far more often than they succeed. That’s the nature of experimentation. Such things must have happened often to your Professor Von Rhein.”

She shook her head. “Professor Von Rhein knew what he was about. This boy seems only to know what he wants.”

Which, I thought with a thrill, was me.

∗ ∗ ∗

I told Oskar the gist of my mother’s complaint. He ought to know, I said, the way they were twisting things. And I suppose I hoped that he might defend himself with an explanation I could carry home.

“It would have worked,” he said, “in time. My aunt understood that perfectly well. She wanted to give me more support, because she knew I’d pay her everything I owed her and more. It was my father who made us fail. He wouldn’t allow her to give me the backing I needed to see it through. Originality frightens him.”

My mother, I suspected, might take Oskar’s father’s side, but I believed that I, like Oskar and Ida, was unafraid of bold ideas. I would help Oskar to see his plans through.

I suspected, too, that much of my parents’ unhappiness derived less from disquiet over Oskar’s character and more from the loss of their long-nurtured vision of the happy Schroeder-Dettweiler family. And if Oskar were only going to replace Ernst, we all might have foreseen a time when the Schroeder-Swann family might have been equally happy; however, the house in the newish neighborhood and the peony garden were lost as well. For it turned out that marrying me wasn’t going to change Oskar’s plans to go to California. We were wedding with what might have appeared to be almost unseemly haste on the twelfth of July, because Oskar’s father had arranged a job for him in the West. He’d contacted the son of a friend who was doing research at the University of California in Berkeley.

Of course, there’s nothing for you at the university, Mr. Swann had written. But Philip, being a responsible young man, supports his studies clerking part-time at the customs office in San Francisco, and in that capacity he’s heard of a lighthouse keeper in need of an assistant. You’ll have to take a test to prove you can read and write, and there’ll be an interview, but I would think you would do all right with that.

Oskar had been bitter at this letter’s condescending tone and resentful, too, that his father presumed that he required help. He’d scoffed at the job for a day or so, but he understood, now that he was taking a wife to California, that he needed something more definite than a vague and glowing sense of opportunity there. Soon enough, he’d decided that working at a lighthouse might provide a chance for some truly independent trials with the engines he’d been working on in an environment, as he put it, “untainted by everyone else’s ideas,” and he was quite cheerful about his prospects.

“My father thinks to teach me a lesson with this. He wants to make me into the sort of plodding person who dutifully does his rounds, seeing no farther than the end of his nose. I’m sorry to be dragging you to who knows where. But I’ll make gold of this, you’ll see. An isolated setting will help me to focus. The lighthouse will be like an incubator, and in a year or two, we’ll come back with something that’ll surprise them all.”

I protested that I needed no apology and didn’t care whether the lighthouse would be an incubator or merely a means of earning a living. From the safe and dully familiar perspective of my room on Tenth Street, the notion of going someplace as unusual and romantic as a lighthouse was enticement enough. It would be a grand adventure, I told my mother, and after all, we’d not be gone forever.

My mother couldn’t hide her despair or contempt. “A lighthouse! In California! An enterprising young man would find far better opportunities here in Milwaukee.”

She was chopping citron and candied cherries for a stollen during one of these not infrequent outbursts, in her distraction uncharacteristically allowing bits of the fruit to escape onto the floor.

I collected them as I answered, feeling that I was the cool woman and she the frustrated girl. “Oskar says there’s too much complacency in this city. People care only for cleanliness and order.”

This was a sharp comment, since we were both well aware that she valued cleanliness and order a great deal. “They’re complacent,” she said, marshaling her dice with the blade of her knife, “because this is a good place to live. Most people I know here have no reason to complain about their lives.”

“I suppose we’re not like most people, then.” I brushed the errant sticky stuff from my hand into the dustbin, thinking with secret scorn of my parents’ smug friends, the men with their whiskers and beer, the women with their curls and playing cards.

∗ ∗ ∗

Our wedding day was gray and cloud-clotted, and my hair, alert to the threatening storm, rose from my head like wires to meet the silver brush as my mother struggled to make the strands lie flat and neat under the wreath of rosebuds Lucy had fashioned for me. The wreath was reproach as well as ornament; Lucy and I had long planned a double wedding, and I’d ruined that, too.

As penance for the upset we’d caused, I’d refused a new dress, but Gustina, who had a talent for decorative needlework, had festooned the bodice of my gray silk with a rope of embroidered pink blossoms and sewn a pink gather inside the kick pleat to match. In this, I stepped across the parlor carpet to the mantel at eleven o’clock. When Oskar touched my hand to slip on the ring, a jolt of static made me gasp.

“Of course, your mother wasn’t up to the trip,” said Oskar’s father—whom I thought of privately as “the great man”—over luncheon. “Given the state you’ve put your aunt Martha in.” He himself had come all the way from Washington, where he was advising some committee. “And you know the demands on your brother.”

My mother had set the table with the delicate blue Haviland, reserved for the finest occasions, and I feared it would break under the pressure of the great man’s knife, with such firmness did he attack his cutlet.

“Yes,” Oskar said. “I understand.”

“What I’m not sure that you understand,” Mr. Swann continued, a triangle of pale meat quivering on the end of his fork, “is that henceforth you must be different.”

Oskar opened his mouth to object, but his father didn’t need to raise his hand to indicate that interruption wouldn’t be tolerated.

“Thus far in your life,” he went on, “you’ve behaved largely like a child on Christmas morning, running from one shiny object to the next.” He paused to insert the meat into his mouth, work his jaws, and swallow. “Given that this is your nature, I would not have advised you to marry, but you didn’t ask for my advice. You never do.” Hurt momentarily muddied his stern expression. “This young girl,” he went on, “isn’t to be cast aside when you lose interest in her.”

“Sir!” I broke in. “Oskar will not lose interest in me!”

Mr. Swann turned his large head in my direction. “You misapprehend, if you believe I’m belittling your charms. Whether he turns his attention elsewhere or not will have nothing to do with you. To be flighty is his way.”

“It is not!” I exclaimed, although I was aware that it was I who sounded childish now.

“I’m not going to be like Manfred,” Oskar said petulantly, “plodding along the conventional path.”

“I’d be the first to agree that you’re not like Manfred. I would point out, however, that the occasion of your marriage affords an ideal opportunity to recognize that there’s a good deal of worthy and profitable work to be done by all sorts of people. Not everyone can dazzle.”

Oskar didn’t look at his father; he glowered at the pale blue rosebuds on his plate instead.

“In any case,” the great man went on, “I’m not here to argue about your path, as you call it. Only to satisfy my conscience that I’ve done all I could for a girl my sister-in-law tells me is a very fine person, which I’m sure you comprehend”—he turned to me—“means a great deal, given the bitterness you two have caused.”

“Surely we need not speak of such things today,” my own father put in.

After this, although the great man went on eating with gusto, the rest of us could swallow only a bite or two of the fruitcake and whipped cream that followed.

When I went to my bedroom to change into my traveling suit, I discovered my mother checking again the contents of the trunk she’d so carefully packed and which could hold so much less than she wanted to send with me, especially since the railway charged by the pound. In keeping with the local disapproval of our plans, there were few gifts, and in any case, we would not have taken many. The idea, Oskar had reminded me, was not to re-create my parents’ parlor in the West. So the ginger jar and the cake plate depicting city hall, the cut-glass water jug and matching glasses would have to remain in Milwaukee. I could bring the silver pickle fork.

Had Gustina starched the linen waists? my mother wanted to know. Did I have my belt and a good supply of cloths? Oughtn’t I to bring my old silk chemise as well as the new one? After all, it had some wear left, and it took up very little room. We’d been through all of this several times already, but the trunk—the very one that had accompanied my mother from Hamburg—was a cord between her and me, and she was terrified lest she forget to supply it with some essential item.

“I don’t see your button box. Did we put it in?”

“Mother!” My emotions had reached a point of exquisite tautness, like the E string on my violin, and the tuning knob kept turning. “I’m sure the West is well supplied with buttons!”

“We don’t know that,” my mother sobbed. “We don’t know anything!”

And then I was in her arms and we cried a bit together, which did much to relieve us both.

“Oh!” my mother said, wiping her eyes. “There’s something else you must have!”

She hurried into her room and returned with the toilet set from her vanity. The silver pieces, engraved with monograms, flowers, and insects, were old-fashioned and heavy, beautiful in their way, but clearly the taste of another era. Among them was a pair of nail scissors, and she used these to cut a lock of my hair, which she’d so often brushed. She curled it around her finger to make a loop. I knew it would go into her locket, along with the silken curls of her sons.