Whisper Hollow (16 page)

She lifted her chin. She would find a way. She wouldn’t stand and be fired at by canon law.

“Thank you for your time, Reverend Mother,” said Myrthen. “May the Lord bless you.”

“And may He bless you, Mrs. Esposito.”

After Myrthen had closed the door behind her, the Prioress sank down heavily into her wooden chair. It was a shame, really. There were fewer and fewer girls every year who expressed a sincere interest in beginning the process of formation. She slipped Myrthen’s letter back into its envelope. She would take it to her filing cabinet in the rectory. But she didn’t imagine she would be hearing from Myrthen Esposito again; at almost thirty-four, the girl was nearing the upper limit of the age requirement, and unless something happened very soon, her eligibility would expire before her marriage did. The Prioress put the letter into her pocket. A shame, but perhaps it was just as well.

There was something rather unsettling about her.

Alta Pulaski covered her husband and son’s dinner of
halushki
and
rogale
with a dishtowel and set it on the kitchen table with a note:
Gone up the hill for a bit.
Walter was at work underground, and thirteen-year-old Abel — who was already as tall as a man and ready to be one — was going rabbit hunting with his friends. She tied a green woolen scarf around her pinned hair, still short while other women had started to let theirs grow longer to contrast with the war rationing and the somber mood of the day. Gathering up her metal paint box and an empty Ball jar, Alta set off on her quarter-mile hike.

All the way up she thought of her painting. She’d started it already, rendering individual leaves on dampened paper — red and yellow sassafras, scarlet-orange hornbeam, bright yellow witch hazel, rust and crimson oaks — translating the scents and colors into textures. Dry brush, stippling, a dash of salt from her kitchen, a scratch of veins into wet paint with a bobby pin pulled from against her temple. To make it seem more real, Alta used water from the mountain brook near her secluded perch. Used dry leaves from the ground for blotting.

Her mind had long forgotten those girlhood fantasies of the forest beyond the southern coalfields of West Virginia. Instead, she focused on the trees.

She was so absorbed in creative thought that the sounds around her — the crunch of leaves, the prattle of the creek — blended into a cool-white rush of noise. It lulled her into that part of herself that was neither dutiful wife nor artist, but essential to both. Preoccupied as she was, she didn’t notice the heavy footsteps that stopped a maple tree shadow’s length behind her.

John Esposito trudged up the mountain, his mind occupied by the burden of bachelorhood, and with a rocking chair slung across his shoulders. Going home to Myrthen wasn’t like going home at all, so he had decided to find someplace else to call his own — a place where he could escape and paint and, possibly soon, a place where he could live.

His uncle, long dead now, had built a double-barrel shotgun shack out of white pine on a hill in Whisper Hollow, shortly after the Eighteenth Amendment forbade the sale of liquor. The same uncle had happily abandoned his pickax and crept into the forest, making a three-stage still out of sheets of copper, putting up corn mash, and running whiskey until he died. For a long time, the cabin and its add-on porch stunk of moonshine, but the years and the wind had blown that nearly all away. Now it suited John just fine.

It loomed in the near distance. John looked up, checking his path, and there, just in front of him, sat a woman on a maple stump.

Alta’s back was to him, lithe and strong and bent over her paper. A tray of paint lay on the ground next to her. John held his breath and watched her dip her brush into the jar of mountain water and scrub it into the picture emerging on her lap.

She looked familiar, but without being able to see her face, he didn’t know why. Her long arms and neck, the elegant and sure way she moved, the graceful stillness she possessed was vaguely reminiscent. He’d seen women like her lounging in bistro chairs at outdoor cafés or strolling along the Thames and the Seine and the streets of Montmartre in the evenings. But he’d seen none of them hunched over a stretch of paper, imitating life in art the way he, himself, would.

Alta put down her brush and straightened up. Then she angled her face to the wind and — he imagined — closed her eyes. Pulling her shoulder blades back like a butterfly flexing its wings, she moved her head from side to side. Then Alta untied the scarf from underneath her chin, balled it, and wiped it across her brow.

Recognition stretched into knowing. Within that infinite moment that she tossed the sweaty scarf onto the ground and picked up her brush, he knew his life would be forever changed.

Eyes still on her back, John let the chair slide slowly down one shoulder and drop to the ground. The thump it made blew behind him on the wind, and Alta showed no sign that she’d heard it — she bent back over her painting and appeared from behind to be completely absorbed in her work. John didn’t want to disturb her, nor did he want to leave, so he eased himself down into the chair and leaned back to watch.

A cool breeze blew into his face, lingering like a kiss, and he relaxed into the rocking chair. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw the figure of Alta, still bent forward, her hand moving with the tiny strokes of her brush. Seeing her brought him an inexplicable comfort. He tried it again. Closing his eyes against the breeze, longer this time, he allowed himself to breathe, listening to the faint rush of the stream in the distance, the leaves. Then he opened them, and there she was, still, again. He smiled. When he closed his eyes once more,
he kept them closed even longer, rocking and listening and absorbing and enjoying and relaxing until everything he’d been carrying — both on his shoulders and in his mind — tumbled down onto the downy, leaf-covered mountain and left him to fall into a deep and peaceful sleep.

When he awoke, smacking away the stickiness in his mouth and opening first one eye and then the other, he blinked quickly, remembering what his eyes sought upon opening, and saw the tree stump on which she’d been sitting. But she wasn’t there.
No!
He sat up straight, toward the edge of the seat, gripping the arms of the rocking chair. There was the impulse to run after her, but his sleep-washed mind was slow to decide in which direction. Then, from his right, he heard her voice:

“You sound like a bear when you sleep.”

She was sitting with her legs crossed and her palms pressed onto the ground behind her, her head tilted to one side in a reflective way. “I heard this terrible roar and turned around. I thought it was a bear. But it was just a man, asleep in a rocking chair in the middle of the woods.”

She was beautiful.

“How long have I been out?”

“Well, I’ve been watching you for about six minutes,” she said, looking at her watch. “No telling how long you were out before that.”

“I tend to fall asleep quickly.”

“And snore like an animal.”

“Will that bother you?”

Her eyes widened and her eyebrows lifted. A second passed, and she let them slide back down into place, biting her lower lip to hide a smile. “No.”

They looked at each other like that for a long moment, strangers locked in recognition, approaching this immediate familiarity from opposite directions. The wind blew at them,
cooler now, and she turned her head toward it, tucking a short piece of her light brown hair behind her ear. Finally he spoke.

“I know you,” he said.

She smiled again. “Yes,” she said. “You do.”

Leaning forward off her hands, she dusted them together and extended the right one toward him. “I’m Alta,” she said. “How do you do?” He leaned toward her from the edge of the chair and slid his hand against hers.

“I know,” he said. “And I’m John.”

A slow smile. “I know.”

Finally, she let his hand go and looked up the hill toward the abandoned cabin, the direction in which he’d been going. “That cabin yours now?”

He nodded.

“That chair will be nice on the porch. Faces the sunset. Are you moving in?”

“In a sense,” he said. “I’m a painter, too.” It was the first time he’d ever called himself one aloud, although he’d been doing it for two decades. Because his painting had forever been a secret, he kept his stash of drawings and paintings in a flat box beneath his bed. Neither his father nor his wife had seen any purpose in such an idle distraction. Myrthen was given to heavy sighs whenever he spread out his oil paints across the kitchen table to work.

Alta tilted her head again, as if to regard him from another perspective. Then she stood up and dusted off the seat of her wool trousers.

“I need to go. My husband’s waiting.”

“Wait,” he said. But she had started already toward the tree stump. He stood up and followed, watched her empty the water from the jar, shake out her brush, and place it back into the metal box. Watched as she touched the surface of her painting lightly, testing. Watched as, satisfied, she rolled it into a loose
tube. Then she picked up her scarf and, despite the chill that had come down the mountain and settled around them, tucked it along with the paint box under her arm.

“Come see me,” he said when she turned back toward him.

“What about your wife? You’re still married, I suppose?”

“Barely.”

“Myrthen is her name, I recall.”

“She won’t know,” he said. “Wouldn’t care anyways.”

“I’m married,” she said. “I have a son. He’s almost thirteen.”

“I’m sure we’ll get along famously.” A spray of fine lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes when he smiled. “How about you just come and paint? I’ll even get another chair.”

She bit her lip again. “I wish I could,” she said.

“Someday,” he countered.

She smiled again, faintly. Then she turned and began the short hike down the mountain, back to her husband and son.

When Myrthen came home from the convent in Ohio, she was resolute. She decided she would move back to her childhood home, which she’d kept even after liquidating the rest of her inheritance to buy the organ for St. Michael’s, as soon as the essential repairs could be done. She didn’t wait a moment longer than necessary to inform her husband of her plans.

The day John arrived home from Europe with a faint limp and a drawn face, she met him at the door and said, “In the eyes of the Church, we can’t divorce, but we can separate. You may consider yourself free to do as you please. Not that you needed my permission before. I plan to have this marriage annulled.” And she stood with one eyebrow arched, allowing time for the information to settle, before opening the door to allow him in.

During the following months, John went back underground and Myrthen resumed her dirge-filled days at the church. They shared a bed, but never their bodies nor any words that weren’t fundamentally necessary. Then the Friday came when her parents’ house was ready and she packed the bags she’d come with fourteen years before. When he returned home from his shift that ended at three o’clock, she told him, “I’m leaving.”

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

“Nothing but my freedom.”

“I won’t stand in your way,” he said, after she’d already gone down the steps. But then he called to her. “Myrthen,” he said.

She stopped and sighed, then turned around.

“I’m sorry. For everything.”

She looked at him, his graying hair, his sad and tender face. “No need to apologize,” she said, straightening her back. “It was all part of God’s plan.”

Myrthen put down her bags and breathed in the new scents of sawed wood and paint. The workmen had bolstered the sagging porch, installed an indoor toilet and bath, replaced the fragile roof, and repaired the waterlogged walls of the house that anybody else would have considered past saving. She didn’t bother with the paint. Improving the façade was not the point; in God’s eyes, everything was beautiful. She merely required function.

Myrthen walked around the house. It was much smaller than she’d remembered, but she liked it all the more for its modesty. Here was the sitting room and the couch where she’d been led into temptation. She would get rid of it immediately. Here was the room that had belonged to her parents, which still contained their iron bed. The mattress had been thrown out after her mother’s body had been discovered, nearly a week after her passing. She looked around and then closed the door. Her mother had had no need for her, not after Ruth died. Now Myrthen had no need for her mother, or any of her things.

Here was the room she’d shared with Ruth, the small bed and chair. Even after her twin had died, Myrthen made a point of taking up no more than half of that small bed that had been theirs. She walked over and touched the faded drawing behind the door, which she had explicitly told the workmen to leave
alone. Ruth had drawn — directly on the wall — two stick figures holding hands. Myrthen remembered the day she’d done it: their mother had scolded Myrthen for fidgeting at Mass, and sent her to their room without lunch. Then Ruth had refused to eat and so she had been sent off, too. She closed the door with only a little bit of a slam, and went to Myrthen and gave her hand a squeeze. Then she drew the two of them there on the wall, and whispered, “Don’t tell Mama.” They giggled into their palms until Rachel came in to shush them.

Now, as though nothing had changed, the stick sisters stood side by side, holding hands. “I miss you, Ruthie,” Myrthen whispered.

Here was the kitchen, the wood stove and sink, the table and chairs her father had made. She stepped up to the window and looked out at the unruly thatch where long ago, Rachel had tended her tidy rows of roots and greens, rosebushes and zinnias. Now the garden was overgrown and full of wild things, as though the woods behind the old shack were sneaking up to reclaim it. The workmen had offered to clear it out for her, but she declined. The only thing she allowed them to cut down was the transplanted myrtle tree that had been growing there for thirty-five years. She told them to chop it into kindling.