The End of Always: A Novel (6 page)

Now some trick of sunlight made his face seem luminous. The wind ruffled his hair. He looked up from his board and patted his pockets as if he was searching for something. Then he caught sight of me and a look of surprise came over his face. He held up his hand. “Fräulein,” he called. “Wait.”

No one called me fräulein. Not even my mother, who otherwise thought it might be useful for me to learn the ways of an island I had never seen and that had already passed into history. I lived in America. I was born here. This was a place where all men were said to be created equal and therefore entitled to be free. I took these ideas seriously. The word
fräulein
belonged to some other girl, and I looked over my shoulder as if I expected her to come up behind me.

The boy trotted down the hillside and stood in front of me. He pushed his black hat back on his head and grinned. He was a little out of breath and his eyes shone and his cheeks were covered with stubble.

“Fräulein,” he repeated. “What’s your name?”

“Marie,” I said, but I spoke so softly that I thought he would not hear me. He nodded.

“I am August Bethke,” he said. He pronounced his last name the old German way, so it sounded like
Bait-ka
. “Pleased to meet you.” He picked up my hand, limp as a dead fish at my side, and pumped my arm up and down. My hand went with his in a way that made me feel that it no longer belonged to me. He laughed and squeezed my fingers.

What love feels like is no secret, but it is hard to put into words. You will know this to be true if you have ever fallen in love, and who among us has not? Girls are trained to fall in love. This is the one thing at which they must not fail. Failure means they are doomed to become mannish, with brusque phrases and sharp tongues and weary clothes that have been passed down to them by their married sisters. I was reared to distrust a mannish woman. In fact, I was reared to distrust all women, with no woman more untrustworthy than the woman who has failed at love.

August dropped my hand.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Nowhere,” I muttered. My face felt hot. My tongue felt thick. I blushed again. I thought of Martha, turning beet red whenever George thrust some stupid bouquet of daisies at her. We were surely cut from the same cloth.

“Nowhere? Out here by yourself? You are very brave.” Once again he touched his fingers to my hand. The nape of my neck tingled and a wave of sparkles rose behind my eyes.

The sound of hammering came from the house.

When I was seventeen, the things I knew about boys came from the boys I knew in school where they stayed among themselves and only ventured close to girls when they had something disgusting to drop down our dresses. I had that experience myself, visited on me by a heavyset boy named Charles Miller, whose family came from Bavaria and ran a butcher shop in the center of town. Charles divested himself of a frog and was disappointed when I was happy to find the thing in my chemise. I did not mind frogs and thought to make a pet of this one.

At lunchtime the boys ran out onto the playground and sat in a circle in the dirt and traded their food, bargaining and jeering, until the best among them felt that he had improved his lot as much as he could and the others crept away to eat their poor crusts in defeat. The girls stayed inside and dutifully stuck with the items our mothers had packed for us.

When you got right down to it, my father was the only boy I had seen up close in a regular way. He was the one who teased me. He was the one who chased me around the house with a spider. He was the one who took my hand as if he intended to shake it and then rolled the bones together until I dropped wailing to my knees. He was the one who laughed at me when I cried.

August looked at me with interest. I realized he was waiting for me to say something.

“I am going back to work,” I said. “I was on an errand.”

He looked me up and down, taking in my skirt, my blouse, my ratty old coat. I felt my face burn again. It was as if he could see through everything I wore, down to my bare skin.

He gestured up at the skeleton of the house. “My father has a company. I work with him.”

He was much taller than me and I felt the way he stood over me. Just behind that, I felt William Oliver’s laundry drawing me, or maybe it was William Oliver himself, exerting his great magnetic pull. On this day, I did not want to return late. I did not want to be fired. I did not want to find myself in front of my father with no explanation for how this had come to pass.

“I need to get back,” I said.

August smiled. He had very white teeth, each a perfect shape. “You should see yourself,” he said. “What a mess.” The gentle way he said
mess
made me realize that he meant just the opposite. He smiled again and brushed my hair back with his bare fingers as if he was already familiar with every part of me.

He leaned toward me. “I know you won’t believe me,” he said softly. “But I remember you.”

A man stepped around the corner of the house. He held a hammer over his head and he waved it in the air. “Augie,” he yelled. “Hey, Augie.”

I looked up at August. “Augie,” I said. I smiled. But my skin felt as if it had been stretched too tight. I already held August’s name like an ache I wanted to touch again and again.

He grimaced and shook his head. Then, very tenderly, he cupped my cheek with his palm, his hand heavy and steady, and I leaned in until I was nothing but that hand, that weight.

“I wanted to help you,” he said. He paused as if he could not find the right words. Then he brushed my hair back again and dropped his hand to his side. “It bothered me,” he said at last. “It bothered me a lot.”

I tried to picture August thinking of me, but I could not picture the look on my face when I saw him with my mother in his arms. I could only know the sound of my mother’s terrible cry. The rest ran away.

In the far distance, a crow called. A second crow answered.
Two for joy
, I thought, and my chest lifted in just the way it would if something inside had come alive. August stepped closer and I pushed at my hair and then I smiled at him and reached over and took his hand. He gripped my fingers hard and looked down at me with a look so raw that I thought I might fall to my knees. We stood like that for a moment, but then the man up at the house yelled August’s name again and I knew I had to get back to work. Still we did not move. After a time, a faint whirl of snow showered down around us. The snowflakes sparkled like glass.

When I lay in bed that night, I could hear Martha pacing the floor. Up. Back. Again. Again. It seemed impossible for a thin person to have such a heavy foot but she did, as if with each step she could stamp the thing that ailed her out of existence. I listened for a long time. I knew she was thinking of George. I knew she was the one of us who always obeyed. I knew she got no reward for that, either.

No one knows why we are drawn to the ones we love. Perhaps the things that happen to us when we are children explain everything that comes later. Perhaps after all the mistaken ideas our parents have about us we feel that we have met someone who recognizes us for who we are and who will hold our spirit like a flame. Some things just lack definition. Love is not always like a love song. It is the darkest emotion and has to masquerade as joy or else we would never dare swim in its river.

Just past midnight, Martha dropped heavily onto her bed. I watched the tree outside my room, its branches black against the black sky. Just through the window glass at the edge of the curtain, the star Vega burned through the night. I thought of August. I felt my heart rise.

N
ot far from where my mother grew up, a ruined castle stood on the hillside above a deep black lake. My mother said that she had seen this castle herself many times while walking in the hills of Rügen. Not much remained, just the foundation, a weedy pit, and a half wall with the shape of one window open in the stone.

Very few people ventured near that castle and almost no one went into the lake. Everyone knew that eerie things happened there. Some said a devil lived in the water. Some said a goddess. My mother was sure it was the latter. On bright moonlit nights, she said, you could see a beautiful woman come through the woods and down to the lake. If you stood quietly, you could see her strip to her skin and then slide into the water, which itself became luminous as soon as she submerged. She was surrounded by a host of pretty girls—her servants—and the girls followed her into the lake. There they all disappeared. Eventually, you would hear them as they splashed. When they appeared again, they would be dressed like brides, long white veils streaming behind them as they made their way back into the trees.

My mother said it was very dangerous for a man to watch the beautiful woman. If he saw her, he would be drawn to touch the water where she bathed. If he touched the water where she bathed, he would lose all of his power. If he lost all of his power, the lake would swallow him whole. If the lake swallowed him whole, he would never be heard of again. These were known facts on Rügen. Everyone discussed these things openly.

Still, a long time ago, several men decided the warnings were silly. These men had grown up on Rügen and should have known better, but they felt they were modern and therefore entertained modern ideas. They believed they could hold these particularities in contempt. So they brought a boat to the lake and left it to float overnight. When they returned in the morning, it was gone. After a long search, they found it tied in the top of a beech tree on the far shore. They knew it was the woman in white who had taken it. And soon after that, one of the men went missing. But only one. The others went back to town and did what men always do. But you never caught them near that lake again.

When my mother told us this story, she told it in such an intense way it seemed that she had delivered a secret message, something that she wanted us to be sure to remember. But my sisters and I paid little attention. We asked about the dress the beautiful woman wore before she went into the lake. We wondered if her hair was white or golden. Hattie wanted to know if her feet were finned like a fish. And my mother smiled and petted our hair and told us not worry about such simple things. Her voice sounded sugary but I knew she was irritated by our questions.

I don’t think it would have been possible for us to understand. The lakes of Wisconsin were deep but nothing emerged from them, certainly not magic, and certainly not women who trailed light behind. Our lakes had rocky bottoms, and if you swam to the limit you would find nothing but a barrel or a wagon wheel or some other piece of trash. No men went fishing and disappeared, except for the men who got drunk and fell out of boats. There was no accounting for such behavior, but I suppose they had better drown and hurt only themselves rather than bring their drunkenness back to their wives and sweethearts.

In the morning, I woke early. Snow had fallen overnight and it was too cold to sleep. My quilt had dropped to the floor and I lay bunched and shivering under an icy sheet. I could see my breath in the bedroom air. My father never did have a free hand with the stove wood and I used to dress under the covers on winter mornings. This day was no different and I saw no point in remaining in a cold house. I put a piece of bread in my pocket and set out for work, where at least it would be warm.

By the time I reached the mill bridge, the horizon radiated pink. To the north, the farmland grew faintly white in the rising light and the river slid away like a great ashen whale. It seemed the world in all of its cold emptiness belonged only to me. This feeling brought me no gladness.

Just as I came up to James Pulliam’s house, the leading rim of the sun appeared behind the trees and the snow turned blue. Edwin stood in the front yard, his breath curling around his head. He should have had a coat but he was outside in his shirtsleeves. He tossed something to a squirrel waiting on its haunches under a tree, but when I came up, the squirrel cocked its head and stiffened. Edwin looked back over his shoulder and saw me and then came across the yard in swift, pushing strides. I stopped and waited with the fence between us.

His lips moved and he turned to gesture at the air beside him. “Where are you going?” he said. His voice was low and clear. His forearms were bare and his hands were raw and red in the cold. He leaned toward me and flicked his thumbs against his index fingers but he did not scare me.

“Work,” I replied. I smiled.

“Where do you work?” He did not meet my eyes when he spoke but looked past me to the pink sky.

“William Oliver’s laundry,” I said.

He made no comment about that but just started off along the fence that stood between us like a line in the land. I followed him on the other side. He looked thin and cold.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

He nodded. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my slice of bread.

“Here,” I said. “Take it.”

He ate quietly and carefully. He did not appear to want one crumb to go to waste.

“Better?” I said.

He nodded.

We came to the end of the fence. The world became brighter and colors appeared, the pale yellow siding of the house next door, the red harness on a horse that jingled past pulling a wagon behind, the driver humped over, a green blanket spread across his lap.

Edwin stared intently at something beyond the trees. Then he turned and strode away without a word. When he got to the porch, he began to walk up and down. He kept his gaze trained on the sky, as if he saw something none of the rest of us could see.

I waited and waited but when he made no move to return, I went on my way. Houses began to send smoke from their chimneys and the smoke rose white against the sky and the familiar smell of coal fires filled the air. A jay stood blue on a fence post and then flew in a blur into a black tree where snow fell. The wind rose. My hairpins threatened to come undone like threads unraveling.

I heard him before I saw him, his footsteps pounding in the dirt, and then he fell in step beside me. He swung his arms and looked at me through the hair that fell over his eyes and every so often stared at the sky, where he would scan the horizon for unknown things.

The sky just looked like the sky to me, the clear blue you sometimes get after a snowfall, the morning sharply drawn under all of that glistening light, the whole of the country coming awake at the same time.

We passed the place where they sold ice cream in the summer. Its blank windows rattled in the wind. Just on the other side, Edwin stopped and put his hand on my arm.

“There is a war,” he said urgently. “I am the angel. I am the light.”

I stopped. “Edwin,” I said.

He looked down at me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I do not understand.”

His expression flattened and he bent down and looked me in the eye. His lips moved and he stared at me for a moment. “You are in danger,” he said. Then he dropped his hand to his side and turned away and made his way back up the street, his shadow thin on the snow.

I tucked my chin into my coat collar and pushed my hands deeper into my pockets. A wagon came around the corner and I stepped out of the way. The horse dropped steaming horse apples into the road while the driver clucked to him as they passed.

By the time I got to the laundry, William Oliver’s man had the fires lit and three kettles simmered on the stoves. I hung my coat on its hook. Then I took up the first duffle and unbound its cord and pulled the sheets into my basket and hoisted the basket onto my hip. I climbed the wooden ladder to one of the vats and began wrestling the sheets in one by one, stirring after each addition just the way you stir when you make a cake. William Oliver stood in the doorway and watched me.

“You are here early,” he said.

I nodded. I dropped another sheet into the water.

“I do not pay overtime,” he said.

I did not reply.

“Mary,” he said. “Did you hear me?”

I turned to look at him and I nodded again.

He sighed. Now he stood in the doorway and watched me stir the wash. I did not like to be caught alone with him. I did not like the feeling of his breath on the back of my neck or the faint brushing of his fingers when he touched my hand. He always pulled his hand back, so I suppose he meant for me to imagine that his touch was inadvertent, an accident. But I knew he touched me on purpose. And when he could not touch me, he watched me, and it felt as if his gaze was another kind of touch.

When my basket was empty, he came over and took it from me and then took my hand and helped me down from the ladder. He would never have dared do this if the others were there, but he had me alone and there was nothing for it but to go along. I shrank from him but he did not notice or if he did, he did not care.

“Who says chivalry is dead?” he said. He was very pleased with himself, as if it took a big man to take the hand of a girl whom he has frightened. He knotted his fingers in mine. I tried to pull my hand away. He tightened his grip and walked with me to the wall, where another duffle waited. The first had come from the Hotel Vanderbilt, which was a mean little place that gave itself airs, and the second came from a private household, for it was tagged with a surname. I knew it would be filled with underpants and all the other things I did not like to touch. But it gave me a good reason to pull free of William Oliver’s hand, and this time he did not try to stop me. I squatted down and unknotted the cord on the duffle and lifted it and shook it out over my basket. There is such a thing as the greater of two evils.

I found only sheets and pillowcases. William Oliver watched me. He rocked back on his heels and when I lifted the basket, he took it from me and put his arm around my waist and propelled me over to the ladder. His hand was heavy on my hip and he bent his cheek to my hair and sighed deeply. My heart pounded. I did not know what time it was. I did not know when anyone else might come. I had no idea what he wanted. But that was not true, for I knew exactly what he wanted, or at least I thought I did.

In the end he returned the basket to me in great haste and made for the soap bucket, as if all along he had had no other intention but to study his inventory. I looked out to the yard and saw Inge in her dark gray coat walking toward us, her lunch pail glinting in the sun.