Easter Island (2 page)

In the center of the sitting room’s carpet, Alice is sprawled on her stomach, drawing pictures. Her stocking feet, flung up behind her, crisscross in distracted excitement. Her long brown braids, Elsa’s morning handiwork, has already unfurled into a riot of curls. Every few minutes Alice leaps up and rattles a picture in front of Elsa: “Beazley,” she announces with a smile. From years of hearing their father use that name, Alice cannot be persuaded to call him Edward. “Wonderful, dearest,” Elsa replies. Then she straightens Alice’s dress, tucking away the lacy edges that have crept up the bodice, the straps that have wandered out of place. A fortnight earlier, Alice lay slung across the chesterfield, her skirt twisted like a bedsheet about her waist, her stark white bloomers perforating the dark shadows of the room. When, having returned from the university, Edward stepped in to say hello, Alice’s indecency startled him. She should at least prevent him further embarrassment. Now, beneath the fastidiousness of Elsa’s hands, Alice squirms and sighs and huffs—the opening notes to her temper’s looming aria.

“Allie dear, I’ve an idea.” Elsa whisks her expression into exaggerated delight. “Would you draw me
another
?”

Then Alice drops down, her black skirt ballooning, and begins again.

Of course, before Edward returns, Elsa will have to hide the drawings. They emphasize too strongly the hollows beneath his eyes, the crease of concern across his forehead; they will no doubt surprise him. “It’s strange to say,” Edward remarked several nights earlier, “but you
do
make me feel so much younger.” He is fifty-five and has never been married. An elderly woman has kept house for him for years, but the presence of two new women in his home clearly unnerves him. Each day, he consults Elsa about the curtains, the wallpaper, and the house itself—
We shall arrange everything to suit you, Miss Pendleton.
(Please, she reminds him, try to call me Elsa.) Edward seems as uneasy in this house as she is. It belonged to his parents and fell into his hands as the only child when his father died. For the past fifteen years he has lived amid the brocade curtains and the china and the glistening cutlery of his childhood. But rather than growing accustomed to what has for so long surrounded him, he seems a guest in his own home. Only now, with the arrival of Elsa and Alice and their crates of pinafores and hats and yellow-back novels, does Edward realize he is not a visitor. He is the host, and his new role absorbs him. Anything Elsa touches or appears to avoid, he notes—
The mahogany side table, I see, is not to your liking; of course it can be replaced easily enough. And perhaps you think the table linens should be a cheerier shade?
—as though women are yet another foreign culture of which he has embarked on a study.

Max is only five years younger than Edward, but having a family lent him a certain ease with women. With Max it was always, if not simple, at least relaxed. Sobbing, giggling—nothing could unnerve him. Despite his inherent sternness, he always understood the language of affection.

Elsa knows, however, that at some point in Edward’s past there was a woman. A third cousin from Dover? The niece of the Royal Geographic Society’s president? She was never told the particulars; only her father’s allusions to the fractured romance revisit her. “Old Beazley has suffered his fair share of amorous afflictions. Enough to send him all the way to the African continent. I’ve often thought the world would still be entirely unmapped were it not for the impetus of a broken heart.” Edward himself makes no mention of it, and if this woman left any impression, it is only one of unease. How else to explain his discomfort with women? He is, after all, reasonably handsome. He carries himself with a stolid intelligence, harbors an intensity of introspection she remembers admiring as a girl. She had always thought him quite playful, much more so than her father; from his travels he brought them wooden dolls with seaweed tresses, rosewood boxes with golden keys; at the end of their puppet shows he would applaud wildly, once snatching the flowers from the mantelpiece vase and tossing them to her and Alice as they curtsied. But with each year that passed, as Elsa moved closer to adulthood, he seemed to grow suspicious of her, even mystified, and reserve, like ill-fitting armor, settled over him. The presents vanished; the laughter quieted. An awkward formality tinged his once-blithe greetings. And now all his actions seem studied: the hand rising tentatively to touch her shoulder; the brass knob of her dressing room door inching like the dial of a vault near its final number.
Ill at ease
—her words to Max, emphasized for his consolation, were true. But is it fair, she wonders, to blame Edward for lacking the flirtations, the effortlessness, the experience, of a married man?

At least he wants to please her. She knows she can rely on his patience with Alice despite his clear distress at her behavior. Whenever Alice approaches, he steps back as though afraid. And the bloomer incident, for which he spent the whole evening spilling apologies—
I am not accustomed to knocking. An old bachelor with old habits. I beg of you both to forgive me
—has caused him to rush past the sitting room whenever he hears Alice within, or to make enough noise as he approaches that any indecent exposure can be adjusted. But was she not honest in her characterizations of Alice? Did he think she was exaggerating? He must have seen some of her hysterics with Father—he visited the house quite often while Elsa was abroad; Father said Beazley seemed fond of Alice. But Elsa also warned that she would not, under any circumstances, stand for Edward treating Alice as a dullard. Alice could read and write, could identify every country on the globe by its outline, could rattle off every species in Swaysland’s guide to ornithology. Birds: They were Alice’s true love. One of the first books Elsa read to her was
Birds Through an Opera Glass
, and ever since then Alice has asked for nothing but bird-watching books. When Edward proposed and invited her and Alice to move into the carriage house on his property until the wedding, one of Elsa’s stipulations was that Pudding, the African Gray parrot their father had bought Alice for her birthday, accompany them.

“He’s quite agreeable. In fact, he barely speaks,” said Elsa, recalling the sad fact that Alice had been able to teach Pudding only a few words—
bird, kiss, superior
(their father’s favorite adjective), and
Alice
—the words Alice thought essential.

“My dear Miss Pendleton. I would never think to separate Alice from her beloved pet. I myself am quite fond of animals. And I have even lived amongst peoples who worship them as gods.”

“I would just like for you to be perfectly clear,” said Elsa, “as to Allie’s situation before any permanent—” She stopped, not wanting to sound too distrustful, too calculating.

“Before arrangements are made?”

“Well, yes.”

“I understand. Before you accept my proposal you would like to ensure Alice’s protection. Yes, Miss Pendleton, I can ensure that.”

His words calmed her, and Elsa was thankful he understood her fears; but she knew her demands were a performance. She was pretending she had other options, that she might, if Edward didn’t accommodate her, refuse his offer.

“But it’s much more than protection, Edward. It is respect I want to ensure. Alice is different, yes. Sometimes difficult to comprehend. But she’s much more intelligent than you suppose. She understands and feels a great deal she isn’t able to articulate in the way that you and I would. But she is really quite like us. Only her emotions tend to sometimes get the best of her.” Emotions, Elsa did not say, that come in the form of fits.

“Some would say, Miss Pendleton, that emotions
are
the best of us. If it is respect you are concerned with, I assure you, Alice has mine. In toto.”

“Are you quite sure?” But as Elsa said this she sounded, even to herself, too insolent.

Quietly, Edward offered, “Yes. . . . Quite sure.” But the words were tinged with discomfort.

“Good,” said Elsa. “Excellent. Yes. We are perfectly understood, then.”

Elsa glances down at Alice, still sprawled on the carpet, drawing slowly. Her large brown eyes, inches from the paper, swallow each detail of the emerging image. “A delicate beauty” is how their father described her, her features chiseled, the bones poised beneath the skin at graceful angles. Her face was a pale oval framed by thick brown braids. Since infancy, Alice’s behavior drew awkward stares in public. But when she turned sixteen, people began to stare before any peculiarity had revealed itself. Pulling open the heavy wooden door of their house in St. Albans, stepping into the bright morning sun, she could seem, for a moment, the loveliest of young ladies, mulling over, as she twirled her parasol, the gentle phrases she would use to decline her latest suitor. But then a curtain of dullness would descend. It was not idiocy, Elsa knew, nor was it a feebleness or weakness of mind; it was a disengagement. As Alice’s lower lip slackened, her eyes would seem lost, as though staring inward at some private thought, some personal theater, for minutes, sometimes an hour, until something—a spark in her mind, an abrupt noise beside her—flashed alertness back into her face, and she reawakened, stunned and eager. It was at these moments hysteria seized her. As her mind bounded back to the scents and sounds of a simple room, to the sight of familiar faces, Alice would mark her return with a squeal or a jump, sometimes stomping wildly on the carpet as her heavy braids flopped and swung, as if to celebrate a distance traveled, a place seen that no one, even Elsa, could comprehend.

“Beazley!” Alice shouts again. In the dim room, her slim white hands, like two crescent moons, curl around the edges of the paper. In this picture, Edward’s brows converge in a violent V of concern.

“Lovely,” says Elsa. “Shall we make another?”

Elsa closes Edward’s book. Through the near-black windowpanes she can see the streetlamps have been lit, a necklace of gold along the dark line of Heslington Road. Several bicycles whisk by, and Elsa sees a white Rolls-Royce glide to a stop in front of a house on the corner. In their father’s neighborhood there was only one motorcar, that of Dr. Benthrop, who used it for emergency house calls. But their father, even when Dr. Benthrop offered him a ride, preferred his bicycle. It was one of his many theories—an indolent body resulted in an indolent mind. When the Ladies Humbers were first sold, he immediately bought one for Elsa and one for Alice, and insisted they cycle thirty minutes each day. At first Alice refused to mount her bike. Not until Elsa, seventeen at the time, cycled around Alice in clumsy orbits would Alice touch the strange steel frame. It took six months of Elsa running alongside, one hand guiding the center of the handlebars, for Alice to keep her balance. What excitement, though, when finally Alice could ride. Elsa loved their outings, cycling along the narrow streets in the late afternoon, stopping at the chemist for Father, Alice placing the small pouch of sassafras root or bottle of wheat germ oil in her wicker basket. As they rode home, Alice would shout from behind “I’m after you!” and then Elsa would cycle faster, sweat prickling from the roots of her hair. The momentum delighted Alice, and when she finally dismounted—cheeks flushed, eyes tearing from the wind—she demanded to know when they could go again. Almost every afternoon they cycled like this. But when Elsa left to take up her first position in Heidelberg, their rides ended. Alice was despondent. And in a letter from her father Elsa learned that Alice, frustrated she was not permitted to cycle alone, had thrust a hatpin into the tires of Elsa’s Humber.

In the distance, a church bell sounds six slow gongs. Alice, her crayon clasped like a scalpel, appears to make slow incisions in the paper. Alice needs her; of that much Elsa is sure. It would be unthinkable to leave her in another’s care, to place her in a colony, away from the world. Too much like punishment for being different. And it would mean only that Elsa had not wanted the task of caring for her own sister. What she has chosen, a life with Edward where she can look after Alice, is best. And writing to Max, a necessity. Such is life, thinks Elsa. Such is fate. Choices are luxuries, and Max will have to understand that. How can I begrudge my own situation, thinks Elsa, with Alice here, a reminder, always, of how fortunate I am? I am fortunate, she tells herself. And a heavy-limbed resignation settles over her as she recalls the letter—
Can I really ask for more?
—as though persuading Max of her acceptance has finally solidified her own acceptance. Once he receives the letter, it will all be over, those distracting months left behind. How many evenings of one’s life could be spent lying awake in troubled speculation? Such nights were a symptom of a life without responsibilities—a life that ended when her father died, when she returned home and stood in the cemetery, clasping Alice’s hand. Only then did she understand how frivolous her former grief had been. As she stood before her father’s coffin, her eyes refused to dampen. When it was time to say the final prayer, she fell silent. Weeks passed. She could not cry; she could not speak of her father. The loss had lodged within her for good.

And now, in the sitting room, Elsa thinks: There is not only this sadness, but there is Alice. And soon, a husband. She must banish all wondering about Max’s feelings, her own feelings. She must think of herself as an adult.

The thud of the front door startles her. Edward calls from the hallway, “Good evening, ladies!” His voice is a strong baritone—a voice accustomed to lecture halls.

Elsa rises, collects the papers from the carpet. “Beautiful,” she whispers as she rubs Alice’s back. “I shall add them to my pile.”

Alice abandons her pout of frustration at the sound of Edward’s approaching footsteps. There is a great bustling outside the door, as though things are being tugged and tossed. This attempt at heralding his entry, thinks Elsa, is a bit extreme.

“Beazley!”

In the archway, Edward pauses. His hair is carefully combed, his beard clipped. He is tall and broad and a long black frock coat hangs tidily over his form. The weight of his satchel tilts him slightly to one side. “And how are my girls today?” Does he realize this also was their father’s nightly greeting? Edward has adopted many of their father’s mannerisms, prompting in Elsa the suspicion that their father asked Edward to do this, to replace him.