Moon Tide (20 page)

The pot of water on the stove has begun to boil. Eve watches as Maggie shaves the small petals off dried blue flowers into a wooden bowl. She grinds the juice out of rose hips and scalds the mixture with water, then coats a thin paste along the base of the tub.

“Get yourself inside it,” she says and turns away as Eve slips off her dress and climbs over the tall side of the tub. Maggie takes the pot from the stove, drains the water through a cloth to cool it, and pours it into the tub around her.

He comes up from the boathouse to find Maggie, to ask her how the old woman is. He stops at the door when he hears their voices and walks around to the back window.

He stands with his face at an angle against the beveled glass. The room comes to him uncertain. He can just make out the mass of kerosene burning from the corner lamp, the dark slash of Maggie and the ruthless way she moves. Her hands shudder like black swallow wings around the pale shape in the tub. The lighter floating head.

Eve takes Maggie in through her shoulders. The hands kneading her, she can feel the give in her neck, her spine. The space around them grows spare as if the atmosphere has lost its compression. She can smell the root before it is broken. She hears the sullen tear as Maggie draws it through her teeth. The bark flakes into the still water around her. She closes her eyes and lies back, resting her head against the rim of the tub. Maggie’s hands touch her face, the fingers working into the bones around her eyes, and they are close, so close, as if in that moment they are not separate, and Eve feels it all over again, the touch, his touch, Maggie, her hands and the root oil moving on her surface.

That night Eve returns to the house. Through the clouds, the moon is stretched to wet gauze in the sky. She comes into the kitchen and walks quietly past her father’s study. She can hear him writing, the scratch of the relentless quill like a rodent through the wall. She slips into the library, feeling her way across the darkness to the gooseneck lamp in the corner by the isinglass stove. She lights it, and turns the wick low so barely a film of orange coats the room.

On the middle shelf is the translation. She turns through the pages, through images of bread, rubies at sunrise, the beloved, until she finds it. She reads the lines slowly, matching Jake’s voice to the type on the page.

Lovers in their brief delight

gamble both worlds away …

A thousand half-loves

must be forsaken—

She rips it quickly. The tearing leaves a jagged edge along the seam. Through the closed door, she can hear her father leave his study, the twist of the key in the lock, his footsteps coming toward her down the hall.

She closes the book and shoves it into the coal bin beside the stove.

The footsteps pause.

“Hello,” he says, his voice slow and disconnected through the cracked door.

She does not answer.

“Hello,” he calls again, as if he is calling into a very great distance and waiting for an echo he is not sure will return.

The door opens slowly, inward. He stands on the threshold with one hand raised.

“Is that you, Alice?”

He steps into the room and carefully makes his way over to the gooseneck lamp. Eve does not move. She sits quietly on the stool. He is less than three feet away from her. “You’ve left the light on again, my dear,” he says gently and turns down the wick so the room falls dark.

He stubs his toe on the foot of the rocker on his way to the door. He leaves it open behind him, his footsteps retreating down the hallway and up the front stairs. They continue along the second-floor passage to his bedroom. Through the ceiling, Eve can hear the sullen creak of the bedsprings.

She draws the book out from the bin and dusts off the coal. She flips it open to the torn page. On her grandmother’s desk, she finds the letter opener and, carefully, she cuts away the edges down to the binding root.

The following morning, she is with Maggie in the kitchen chopping vegetables for stew. Through the window she sees Jake walking up the hill toward the house.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, shoveling the celery she has cut into the bowl.

Maggie glances up, surprised.

“I just have to run upstairs,” Eve says. “I left something upstairs. I’ll be right back.” She hurries out. She listens from the second-floor landing. She can’t hear their conversation, but she waits until the voices are done and the screen door has closed behind him. She waits until she can see his red flannel shirt moving down the wagon trail that leads back to the boathouse. Then she returns to the kitchen.

She sits back down at her place, picks up the knife and a new stalk. “Who came?” she asks, and she keeps her voice careless.

“Jake.”

“Oh. Did he come to ask after Nonna?”

Maggie stands up and walks over to the stove with the cutting board. She dumps the diced carrots into the pot. “I told him she’d be fine. As fine as she’ll be. Not worth his coming around. I told him she wouldn’t be quite the same after what happened yesterday. Might not know it yet but sometimes things happen to change you and no matter how you want it back the way it was, everything’s different then.” She looks up at Eve, squarely, her eyes dark. “But I told him I’d pass it along—that he came asking after her.”

Eve can feel the flush spread across her face. She looks away. She cuts the last piece of celery. She cuts it slowly, gently, working the knife down against the board until she can feel the wood dent under the blade.

Maggie pulls a gutted chicken from the soaking pail in the sink and sets it on the counter next to the stove. “You get what you went for upstairs?” she asks.

Eve smiles, awkwardly, her mouth tight. “You know, I couldn’t remember. Once I got there, I couldn’t remember what I’d gone for. It must not have been so important—I guess—you know, just one of those senseless things.”

Maggie nods. She slaps the chicken against the counter and breaks the thighs away from the hips. “Like I say, I told him I’d pass it along that he came asking after her.”

Patrick

I
t might be out of guilt that Patrick calls at Skirdagh that following afternoon—his secret shame for having left her there, on the sandflat, as he did. He has told himself it was a mistake: he thought she was ahead of him, that the crowd of guests had picked her up and swept her back to safety on the hill. He has given the same explanation to others, and it makes sense, of course. In the light of day and appearances. He has told himself that the guilt is absurd. She was safe in the end, after all. The young caretaker—what was his name?—had gone back out for her. Patrick had watched them from inside the crowded dining room, he had watched the man as he waded up to his hips in the river and carried her—Patrick’s dream of what that unkempt town could be—drenched in his arms.

When Eve opens the door, Patrick is standing on the front steps with a bouquet of calla lilies that she knows must have come from the florist in the city. She invites him in for tea, and they sit out at the small wrought-iron table on the back porch. The afternoon sky is clear, and there is no trace of yesterday’s storm apart from some thin branches at the edge of the yard that Maggie has already raked into a pile.

Patrick makes no mention of the previous day’s events beyond a polite
inquiry regarding the health of her grandmother. She asks where he is staying and how long he intends to remain in the town. He answers that his plans are not altogether clear. The length of his stay is contingent upon a number of things that are still undetermined. He looks at her, perhaps meaningfully, as he says this.

Eve glances down at the table and the paisley design molded into the wrought iron.

He stays for a little less than an hour and asks if he can call on her again. She hesitates at first, then nods. That would be fine, she says, and he smiles. His teeth are perfect. Small. White.

In those last two weeks of August, he calls for her at the house nearly every day. They take strolls on the beach and drives into Padanaram. He takes her dancing at the Acoaxet Club and to hear chamber music at the Point Church. They spend the afternoons together on the back porch. He sits with a book several chairs away as she sketches out a still life of dahlias in a vase. They talk some but not too much.

She asks about his studies in architecture, and he tells her that he has a particular interest in city forms that place an emphasis on hierarchical order and function. “A mix of seventeenth-century urban design and the newer Bauhaus theories. Personally, I am not so fond of Gropius—too vigorous, I find. I prefer the work of Mies. Are you familiar with Mies?”

She shakes her head and notices that when he is turned a certain way, she can see pictures of the day she met him in his face: the long plank tables set out on the sandflat, the reflected silver light. She sees the terraced house up on the hill and the bare black skeleton of the pier at the end of Cape Bial. She can see herself standing on that pier, with the low-slung fleece of darkening clouds, the storm front massing in across the river. As he goes on speaking, she imagines that, deep below his voice, she can hear the sound of water filling in her ears. It is a sound that comes from a great distance, as if she has placed her ear up against the open lip of a conch. It is a sound that cannot hurt her from that distance.

The sun strikes his face, and there, across the wide empty plane of his cheek, she can see a line of cattle moving slowly toward a hollow dome.

One afternoon, as they are sitting out as usual on the back porch, the heat is oppressive. Small blackflies beat around them in the still wind. He asks her if she would like to take a walk down to the river.

“Just for a spell,” he says. “There will be a breeze there, I’d imagine.”

She hesitates. She has not gone down to the river since the day of the clambake. She has seen Jake several times, but she has avoided any direct passing.

Patrick swats his book across his face to bat away the flies.

“All right,” she says. He stands up and offers her his arm.

As they walk across the yard, he begins to tell her about an essay he has been reading about a project for Domino housing.

“It is practically a revolution in urban planning,” he says mildly.

The grape leaves, she notices, have grown thick. The fruit hangs in ripe clusters and the scent is strong. The Virginia creeper has turned early, and the leaves twist in fierce red rags through the juniper trees. Patrick goes on talking as they walk down the wagon path. Eve catches words of what he says—details about long strip windows and cantilevered space. The grass crunches dry under their shoes. Patrick is still talking as they come out onto the lower meadow. Jake is at the far end scything hay. A flock of swallows beat out of the tall trees behind him, then curve away down toward the river. Their wings scrape the sky. He keeps the scythe low as he works, the blade sweeping back and forth in long and rhythmic curls, his shoulders loose under the weight. His cutting is even, slow and intentional, and the hay lies down under the blade. He will leave it there, outstretched in its windrows, to dry. He will come back several days later to turn it so the drying takes place on all sides. He will rake it into piles and pitch the stacks into Caleb Mason’s horse-drawn flatbed wagon, and the hay will be pulled to Mason’s farm two miles up the road and stored as feed.

The sunlight pools on the field. He has not noticed them. He works
with his back turned, moving down the last row along the stone wall toward its end that intersects the path.

They will meet, Eve realizes, with a sudden stab of panic. Patrick is saying something about tall buildings divided by broad cubist parks.

His voice carries. Jake stops his work, the scythe in midswing. He takes them in with a glance over his shoulder. His eyes are cool, and they rest for a moment on her face. Then he turns away, wipes the sweat from his brow, and continues working the scythe along his row toward the corner of the wall. He stops at the end and takes a whetstone from his pocket. He works it down the blade to sharpen the edge.