Nancy Culpepper (25 page)

“I have something to tell you,” Artemisia told him one day.

Of course, she meant she was pregnant. He hoped not, for he feared a child inheriting her affliction.

“We might heir a fortune,” Artemisia told him.

“What?”

“I’m an Edwards. Nova and me. We sent in to be heired.”

“That Edwards thing that Early Otto and them’s so worked up about?”

She nodded eagerly. “We kept it a secret from you that we sent in.”

“Do tell,” he said, amazed by this information—so inconsequential, yet such a secret. “Why in the world did you keep it a secret?”

“We wanted it to be a surprise.” She didn’t reveal that she and Nova had donated so many ill-gotten dollars.

Artemisia tried to be a good wife; she was agreeable, unlike her sassy sister. She did what Bealus wanted, and she offered him all the pleasures her sister had instructed her in. She wanted to ask an occasional quarter or dollar from him the way Nova had, but shyness forestalled her. She regretted telling him the secret. Once she had told him about the inheritance, he crushed her hopes. He made little of it and shamed her, refusing to reward her.

Before long, a letter arrived, wanting a dollar, and she did not have it. She fluttered her eyelash against his tender tumescence—a butterfly aquiver. His throbs gave her hope, but later when she worked up the courage to say she could use a dollar for some new ribbons, he said, “You know there’s no dollars to be had. Don’t you know times is hard? Where’s your head living at, pretty little girl?”

She stewed about the matter. Her mistake had been in offering herself freely from the start. She should have introduced the request for quarters first, before indulging him. She was so used to keeping the secret, that now it was known she felt shame, her nerves agitated. The secret was turned inside out like a snakeskin, as if it had been something inside her, nourishing her, keeping her soul together. She cried inside, wailing, but ever so silently. Bealus did not believe in the inheritance. He did not believe it would ever materialize. “It’s a dream for fools,” he said. She knew it had dawned on him what Nova had done with the money she solicited from him, money he could have used to trade for a cow or a mule, or to buy shoes for his children.

Artemisia felt her small life enclosed by the split-rail fences of Bealus’s sixty acres. She craved a few things in life, but she had never demanded anything. Now her desires bloomed. She longed not only for a piano but also for some books, and for some silk material to make a dress. She wanted silk that would feel as fine on her skin as her subtle tonguings had been on Bealus’s flesh. Her imagination churned with these little wants, so much removed from the grease can, the slop jar, the iron skillet, the lye soap, the snot-nosed, supercilious children of Nova’s, the patronizing church members who all regarded Artemisia as a freak of nature. Her mind wound around and around, craving a velvet weskit and a feather boa, books to read, paper for writing, a man from a newspaper to talk to her about the world, to bring her news of the world, the world that spun around and around and around.

Bealus found her among Nova’s dresses in the garret. He had been in the fields from sunup to sundown, and Betsy had brought his dinner at midday. She said Artemisia was lying down, resting. In truth, Betsy had not looked for her but had whipped up the dinner herself and dragged the buckets on a child’s wagon to the fields. That night he found his wife, twisted out of shape, her tongue bitten, the satin dress with which she pillowed her head still damp. He buried his head in her unfurled hair, as if to extract the essence of her gentle caresses in one last draught. He cried until he was hoarse and her hair a soaked mop. In repose, her face was sweet and childlike, drained of desire and insufficiency. He could see more than ever the features of Nova, the shape of Nova’s mouth.

A few weeks after Artemisia’s funeral, Early Otto brought a letter from the U.S. Postal Service, addressed to Bealus. Bealus sat on a stump beside the road to read it. The letter inquired if he or any members of his household had received any letters regarding inheritance claims. The Postal Service was investigating fraud. There was a form to fill out and a return envelope. After a morning of forking potatoes, Bealus was weary, his heart heavy as a bushel of seed corn. He slid the letter into his pocket. He did not want to answer this query. After all, the two women he had buried might have been right. The inheritance might come. He felt he had no right to put a stop to their hope. He had to honor their dream. Bealus waved to Early Otto, who was sitting in his Model T by the mailbox, his engine hiccupping, waiting, as if Bealus might have something to tell him.

3

Nancy rearranged the pillows behind her, wishing she had her microwaveable heat pack to ease the stiffness in her back. As a child, she had slept with a hot brick on cold nights, a brick warmed on the coal stove and then wrapped in newspapers. She clearly recalled the sensation of its warmth, the smell of hot paper. Then the weight of her heritage came rushing through her mind, as if the brick, a straight aim from those two desperate women, had been thrown at her. A shadow of raw grief descended, wrapping scarecrow arms around her, and she wept for the loss of her parents. Like Bealus, her father was cunning and strong and detached, carrying a world in his head. Like Nova, her mother burned with frustration and desire. Nancy cried because she had gone away and had not shared her life with them, except in her imagination.

She heard the ice machine roaring in the hallway, and a man and woman laughing, and in the parking lot a horn blast.

The last letter, the one from the U.S. Postal Service, contained a notice of fraud investigation, with several inquiries about the Edwards estate. Included was a return-reply envelope. Evidently Bealus Renfroe had never answered the inquiry—out of embarrassment? Humiliation? Artemisia and Nova had stored the letters in the shoe box—with a stick of dynamite?—for a future generation to pursue the claim. Nancy supposed her grandmother, Nova and Artemisia’s sister, had preserved the letters. Her grandmother saved everything— string, pins, scraps—for the sake of saving, it often appeared, not for any true purpose. It occurred to Nancy that her grandmother was capable of saving a stick of dynamite.

Nancy saw herself in this group of people, lives that had passed from the earth as hers would too. She felt comforted by the thought of continuity, even if a stick of dynamite could be called an heirloom.

In her mind’s eye Nancy gazed at a spot of ground behind her grandmother’s house. Inside the old wash house, her mother was feeding print dresses through the wringer of the washing machine. Outside the wash house, Nancy’s grandmother was stirring boiling overalls with a broomstick, while a fire smoldered beneath the iron kettle. Nearby, Nancy, a child, was flinging underwear and washrags onto the thorny, overgrown quince bush to dry. Beyond was the expanse of fields, with a pointillist splotch of Holsteins grazing. And far in the distance, beyond the second tree line, in the corner of the landscape, her father rode his tractor, like a bug crawling on the painting, like Icarus falling unnoticed from the sky.

Over the following weeks, this image would stay in Nancy’s mind, long after the Culpepper family farm was sold for an industrial park and Nancy and her sister and brother had retreated with the profits.

The Prelude

Nancy was waiting in Windermere for Jack’s train. With its grassy splendor, the Lake District was an ideal place for a marital reconciliation, she thought. She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He was flying from Boston to Manchester, then catching the train.

In the ladies’ room at Booth’s, next to the station, she fussed over her hair and her eye makeup in a way she never had when she and Jack started out together, in the sixties, when her hair was long and straight. Now she used hair mousse and eyeliner. She no longer knew how to interpret the face she saw in the mirror.

If it were 1967 again and she knew what she knew now, how would she behave? She liked to imagine herself as a young woman, going north to begin graduate school, but this time she would be carrying confidence and poise as effortlessly as wheeling ultralight luggage. If she had had a sense of proportion back then, would she have married Jack?

She bought a fat double-pack of Hobnobs. She remembered how much Jack had liked those oat biscuits when they were in the Lake District together, long ago—rambling amongst sheep and bracken through the Furness Fells. Now she was on a Romantic kick, she had told him on e-mail. She was tracing the footsteps of Coleridge and Wordsworth, trying to capture in her imagination the years 1800–1804, when the two poets were involved in a romantic upheaval in their personal lives. It was not true that Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William had an incestuous love, Nancy thought; Dorothy was surely in love with Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—a married man, peripatetic, unhealthy, an excitable genius. But Coleridge was obsessed with another woman. Dorothy, doomed never to know the love of a husband or a child, gathered mosses and made giblet pies and took notes for her brother’s poems. That was the story that kept coming to life in Nancy’s imagination, and once it had sparked in her mind, she couldn’t stop it. When Nancy and Jack were young, pairings and commitments were casual and uncertain, and Nancy even wondered later if she had really been in love with Jack. But the passionate love triangles—and trapezoids—in the Lake District two centuries before seemed desperate.

Early in their marriage, when Nancy and Jack traveled to England, their passion was unadulterated. After arriving in London, jet-lagged, they collapsed in the afternoon, then awoke at 3 A.M. Not knowing what else to do, they made love, after dropping a shilling into a wall heater, as if it were some kind of condom dispenser. They always thought that their son, Robert, was conceived in England, perhaps on that occasion.

Or maybe it had been a few days later, here in northern England. Jack had an assignment to photograph cottages. Nancy, who had written a paper on the Romantic imagination for a history course, had brought along an anthology of Romantic poetry. But the poems seemed old-fashioned, with their hyperbole and exclamation points, and she read few of them. Jack was shooting landscapes, and throughout the trip he goofed around trying to sound as if he were from Liverpool, like the Beatles. Nancy had a cold, and she was hungry, but when they arrived in the town of Kendal late on a Sunday, there was no place to eat. They bought Hobnobs and overripe pears from a chemist, who directed her to a preparation on a dusty lower shelf—a fig syrup that was good for colds, an analgesic.

“It’s a very old remedy,” the chemist said. “We’ve used it for generations.”

At a bed-and-breakfast on a hillside of houses with long front gardens, Mrs. Lindsay served an elaborate tea, with little sandwiches and biscuits, enough to call dinner. She sat by the fire chatting about her flowers, her youth, her son the stevedore in Cardiff. Nancy sat entranced, her slightly feverish warmth dissolving into a comfortable ease. Mrs. Lindsay was seventy-five—very old, Nancy thought, thinking of her frail, taciturn grandmother in Kentucky.

Upstairs with Jack, Nancy swigged fig syrup and blew her nose. The syrup made her sleepy, and she slept well in the deep feather bed with piles of fluffy coverlets. At breakfast downstairs, Nancy studied the lace curtains, the flowered wallpaper, the ornate china cupboard, while Jack wrote in his notebook.

“Did you see Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth lived?” Mrs. Lindsay asked as she poured hot milk into Jack’s coffee.

“We’re going today,” Nancy said.

“When I was a wee one in Grasmere I heard the old ones talk about Mr. Wordsworth.”

“You knew someone who knew Wordsworth!” Nancy was astonished. The Romantic period was ancient history.

Mrs. Lindsay set the coffeepot on the sideboard. “They remembered him walking over the hills, always walking, with that stick of his,” she said.

Nancy’s interest in the Romantic poets went dormant after that and didn’t reawaken until the past year, after she and Jack sold their house in Boston and agreed to live apart for a time—until desire reunited them, they said. Alone in the Lake District, Nancy revived the image of Wordsworth and his stick. She carried it with her, supporting her thoughts of the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth, as she imagined the pair hiking in the surrounding landscapes. Her mind dwelled on those characters, seizing each clue to their reality. If Wordsworth was a steady walker, Coleridge was an intrepid pioneer trekker, the type of person who today would have written a Lonely Planet guide. In his fight against an opium addiction, he would trot out boldly into the wild, with his broomstick and his green solar spectacles, daring to walk the drug out of his system. On at least one occasion Coleridge hid out in an inn at Kendal, maybe on Mrs. Lindsay’s street. He went to the chemist for his opium, a mixture called Kendal Black Drop. Nancy smiled to herself, remembering now the fig syrup, pushed to the back of the dusty shelf.

Nimble Jack bounded down from the train. When he saw her, he dropped his blue duffel. Still clutching his camera bag, he jumped up and clicked his heels in the air.

“I can still do it!” he cried.

Nancy burst into laughter. She loved the attention he attracted. Her husband—a grown man, a middle-aged man, a kid. His face was a little harder and thinner. Their embrace was long and tight, with embarrassed squeals and awkward endearments.

“I don’t know how I got along without you,” he said, holding her against the wall of the track shelter.

“We’re both crazy,” she murmured.

“What have you been doing up here?”

“Getting Hobnobs for you,” she said, producing the package.

He laughed. He probably hadn’t thought of Hobnobs in thirty years, and maybe he didn’t even recognize them, she thought.

In the taxi, Nancy gestured toward the glistening lake and the gentle green mountains, but Jack was chattering about his flight and his sister Jennifer’s family in Boston. He had a nervous catch in his voice. Then he apologized for that.

“It’s all right,” Nancy said in a soothing tone. The tone was a bit new for her, she thought. She rather liked it. “We’re going to be fine,” she said.

“Thank God for e-mail,” Jack said. “How did couples ever work out their differences in the past?”

“They went walking,” Nancy said.

“Up here for the walking, are you?” the taxi driver, a woman in Bono sunglasses, asked. She said she was a native and had walked all over. “This is the best place in the world,” she said. “I’ve just been to Spain and walked the Sierra Nevada. Really enjoyed that. But I wouldn’t trade the Lakes.”

As they neared Ambleside, Jack began to consider the scenery. But the view now was throngs of tourists. Nancy had insisted they did not need a car. Cars were discouraged because of the traffic, she told him. She had been there for a week, walking miles every day, just as Dorothy Wordsworth did before she lost her mind.

The lobby of the hotel in Grasmere, where Nancy had been staying, was barely large enough for Nancy and Jack to stand together at the counter. Nancy could have afforded a posh hotel, but she had resisted, uneasy about spending her inheritance on luxuries her parents never had.

“Oh, is this your hubby?” the desk marm burbled, pronouncing it “hooby.” She smiled pleasantly at Jack. “Enjoy your stay, luv.”

As they climbed the soft-carpeted stairs, Jack said, “I brought my boots. You said we were going to climb a mountain a day. Do I need a walking stick?” He joked, “Maybe I need a cane.”

“We’re not old.”

“If you say so,” he said. “That reminds me. I’ve got some news.”

“Oh, what?” She couldn’t tell if he meant good news or bad. Jack had perfected an enigmatic expression.

“Robert and Robin took me to the airport. Robin sent you something. It’s in my bag. But that’s not the news.”

“So is Robert going to marry that girl?”

Jack shook his head. “Who knows?” he said, with a slight flicker of a grin.

“She’s nice. I like her.”

Robert had been living with Robin for two years. Nancy thought Robin was an improvement over his ex-wife, the post-colonial feminist academic from Brattleboro.

In the modest room, Jack glanced around at the evidence of Nancy’s life there—books, hiking boots, a periwinkle fleece neck gaiter—as if he was seeing a side of her he didn’t know. Although he was still slim and athletic, she could see his face was older, but she was already getting used to it. His familiar face jumped back into place. Probably he saw the same aging in her, but he regarded her tenderly, as though he hadn’t noticed the white down that in certain lights was beginning to show on her chin.

“I was afraid something would happen to you here, out walking alone,” he said, hugging her once more.

“It’s not dangerous here. Tourists, tourists everywhere.”

“I still didn’t like it.”

“Tell your news?” she asked.

“We need to wait a little for a better moment.”

“A Romantic moment?”

He grinned. “I get it.”

“The poets have been keeping me company.” She laughed.

“Aren’t they a little old for you—dead, maybe?”

“Historians always get crushes on dead guys.”

Nancy vowed not to bore him with her latest obsession. She was putting away her jacket, making a place for his luggage. She felt a bit flustered, as if she was going to entertain a near-stranger. They hadn’t really kissed yet.

When Jack came out of the bathroom, she went in. Beside the sink she had made a wall display of Lake District scenes—Grasmere, Loughrigg, Derwentwater. Tourist postcards, not art. He probably disapproved, she thought. She hadn’t always understood his photography. “What is it a picture
of?
” she always wanted to know, but he wouldn’t tell. “History majors!” he would say. Yet she thought a photograph of knives laid in bomber formation lacked subtlety. Was it supposed to be a statement—about war, say—or was it the simple shock of surreal juxtaposition, as facile as a video on MTV? Even MTV was a generation ago, she thought now. She could hear the telly. Jack had turned on BBC 4.

She had once told him his pictures were cold, and that hurt him. He was actually warm and loving, much more so than she was. Still, the pictures
were
cold somehow, she felt. But was that a good reason for the breakup of a marriage?

He was standing by the window, watching the swift, narrow rush of the River Rothay below. His hair was thinner, sandier, but not really gray. Her own brown hair had an auburn sheen, and in bright light she could still find individual rust-red hairs, as if they had been borrowed from Jack.

Turning from the window, he embraced her and they tripped around in a clumsy little circle on the thin floral carpet. She thought his news would be about his photographs, and she wanted to show affection, offer praise. She had been rehearsing. Never good at small talk, she had always found it difficult to issue congratulations or happy, encouraging words. She was often preoccupied; she was laconic; she didn’t elaborate or waste words. It did not occur to her to say, “Good job, honey.” She had never called him “honey.” But of course she had always loved him. He knew that.

Now Nancy, the grad student miraculously possessed of style and a sense of proportion, and ready with appropriate words, smiled. Jack had opened the curtain and was gazing across the fast-flowing water at the church tower. The Wordsworths lay in its shadow, in the graveyard.

“Robert and Robin—it’s their news,” Jack said, turning to her. “They’re having a baby.”

Nancy gasped. “Well, knock me down and call me Popeye!” It was something her mother might have said. The phrase shot foolishly through her newfound poise. She sank onto the bed. “Wow. I’m speechless.”

“I was surprised. Bowled over. Thrown for a loop. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I’m agog. I’m stupefied. I’m—”

“You had time to rehearse that!” Nancy cried. Jack’s trick of reeling out synonyms had always amused her. Now she started to cry.

“It’s O.K.,” he said, curling his arm around her shoulders. “Robin is a sweet girl. Robert’s old enough to make us grandparents. Not that we’re old! You just said that.”

“Stop,” Nancy said through her tears. “I’m not crying over that. I’m crying because of the synonyms.”

“Want me to go on? I was dumbfounded. I was nonplussed. I was—”

“That’s one thing I missed. I missed that so much.”

“I begged Robert and Robin not to tell you yet, to let me bring the news, because it’s
our
news too. I wanted to share it with you, to see the look on your face.”

She smiled, but only slightly. She had a sense that she was somewhere off to the side, observing her happiness. She held back, for fear of ruining it.

The bed slanted downward, and the shiny duvet on the comforter made crinkly sounds. The bed was unfamiliar to their marriage. And the time of day was unusual, too. Robert, their child, was becoming a father. This was how it was done, she thought, as she and Jack reenacted the moment of creation. She couldn’t get away from the surprise: a bit of her and a bit of Jack, combined once, now recombined with something else to initiate a new generation. The phrase “recombinant DNA” floated through her mind, although she wasn’t sure what it meant.

Jack sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was slow. You used to call me ‘Speedy.’ ”

Nancy patted him. “It’s all right. We’re out of practice.” She smoothed the goose-down comforter in place. The thing was surprisingly warm. “Ejaculation,” she said suddenly. “Jack off! I never thought of that before. People used to say ejaculation when they meant exclamation.”