Every Past Thing

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Alice waits by the parlor windows with the heavy velvet curtains nearly closed, so she can see but not be seen. Three times she has leapt to her feet, certain she heard the carriage-Samuel had sent his own to fetch them. Three times certain and three confounded, so now the waiting has become a trial and a degradation. It demands of her a patience that makes her neck itch. Though nothing actually disturbs her neck: not hair escaping from the careful pile atop her head, not her dress, which plunges low in front and back, symmetrical but for the body's asymmetry, and all silk: Why not, luck provided?

It was luck, she grants, luck and not anything else that brought her to these comfortable surroundings, husband upstairs and dinner waiting in the kitchen and orange silk wrapped snug about her and then flowing to the floor. With every reason not to itch, she itches. (Though vanity prevents the indulgence of scratching. Her chest must not be scrawled over with pink gashes.)

How can she be expected to make a good impression on his family, she wants to ask Samuel. Dinner cold an hour ago. But he does not leave his study.

She must not succumb to scratching. Or to pacing. She sits down on the sofa and opens her book. She will not look out the window anymore, nor stand in the foyer. She will slow her breathing; she will not be bothered by the lateness of famous Edwin Romanzo Elmer the painter, nor Mary, his worshipped wife. It was in poor taste, she must screw up her courage to tell Samuel, to speak of a woman as though she were a saint. Her child dead not her choice. Her name, either. Mary, mother of God. The chestnut purée will be wasted on them. She should have settled on a plain consommé and been done with it. Strangers they are to her, after all: Samuel's brother and his wife, who did not even come to their wedding.

She is reading the Lives of the Painters in preparation for meeting Edwin. Distemper not madness but a paint mixed of egg or the milky juice of fig tree twigs. Michelangelo recommended that wives be "ten years younger, healthy, of a good family" (surely twenty years younger-as she to Samuel-that much better). In every life. Alice notes, these artists were failures first, and refused the paths laid out for them: Neither scholars nor wool merchants would they become. Perhaps then Samuel's hopes for Edwin were not misplaced, because Edwin has proved to have a genius for worldly failure.

It was all very well for Giotto, who could sketch his sheep with a stone, as they flocked about him, grazing. "That's it! That's all Edwin needs," Samuel had said, when she read aloud Giotto's unlikely story, how the great painter Cimabue had happened upon the boy shepherd drawing on a rock on a hill in Vespignano. "To be seen. We'll bring him down from the hills. We'll find him a master." She would see. They would all see, how astonishing it was that years after their boyhood home had burned to the ground, Edwin could render it precisely from memory.

Very well. She has no comment on talent, or boyhood. But she does know that the portrait of Samuel that hangs in their hallway has something about it not at all a likeness. It's not a portrait of the Samuel Elmer she knows.

When Alice pushes aside the curtains again (though she had promised herself she would read until a knock came), a woman and a man standing on the bottom step so surprise her that for a moment it seems impossible that they should be real. Impossible that they are they and she is she. Impossible that they should matter to her at all, this small woman and this dark-haired man with the top hat just slightly out of fashion. (Too tall, she judges.) Impossible that they plan to approach her door. Yet they look up in her direction, as if their steps toward her had already been approved by a divine order, to which everyone save she is privy. All the people who are not Alice Elmer, and see as she does not. If she were consulted, she does not remember.

All because she had once taken off a stranger's hat. Alice stops to think of that moment, as someone else might drink for courage-to think that she was a woman of such audacity (and beauty-but could she help that?) that once she had walked up to a man she desired and removed his hat; to think that this very man, father of a grown daughter, had married her soon after! From this distillation of the past, Alice draws fortitude. Filling in the substance of Samuel's frame, the intensity of his brown eyes-how exceptional had been their meeting! How quickly they had fallen in together!-she strengthens herself.

And looks again at the man and woman on the bottom step. The woman's back to her. She's tiny, clad in a dark wrap. A pinch to her shoulder blades, as if they were folded wings, delicate, poised for flight. Fragile, Alice decides. This is what Samuel dared not say. So this is Mary, on Alice's step, a sister now. Because of a hat. Because Alice had lifted Samuel Elmer's top hat from his head, and brushed back the hair that fell across his forehead before the thought came to either of them what it meant, for a man to be so touched by a woman he did not know. The familiarity of it-smoothing his hair! Because of that, Alice peers through the opening in her curtains at this woman and this man. They are not coming up, Alice realizes with quick relief. They must have taken down the wrong number. They must be someone else's guests.

When the small woman reaches to touch the end of the man's thick dark mustache-not at all streaked with white like Samuel's, does he color it?-the gesture takes Alice by surprise. Though nothing is more ordinary than a wife touching a husband, she supposes. The woman's hands small and purposeful. She must offer to take Mary's gloves-if she be Mary-and look to see if Edwin's mustache has streaked them black. Sine supposes his color could be natural: He is a year younger than Samuel. And softer, she thinks. Slighter. Vague where Samuel is definition and substance. How much she prefers the brother who is hers! And how much she prefers the brother who is not hers to his wife. Her tininess makes Alice feel too large. And the fragility of her bones, clumsy. She, Alice, is not fine enough, not acute enough. Well!-she cannot help if she prefers not to sigh or grieve or think about life as it might have been. She grants Mary virtue-she cannot say that applying oneself to libraries and political committees and Lord knows what else is not virtuous. But she, Alice, is the one Samuel has chosen. She had taken his hat, and he had taken her.

Samuel always spoke of Mary softly, as if to raise his voice to its usual daylight volume would chase away the few words that came: "Light and quick. And-"

"And?"

"And then-then Effie died. Just nine years old. Their only. After that-"

When Alice saw that Samuel was somewhere else, making she knew not what of the border between wainscoting and the papered walls above, sine frowned, impatient with his silence (though if she had seen her reflection, she would have softened the furrows between her brows and parted her lips slightly, to suggest the ease with which words might pass, to indicate her willingness to hear all he might say).

"What happened to Edwin then?"

Samuel squinted at her, as if he did not understand whom she meant.

"Edwin. Your brother."

"Oh, well. Edwin." Samuel rolled his eyes and moved as if to stand, then reached toward her instead, dragging his thumb across her lip. Though perhaps he had not meant to dismiss Edwin in favor of making love to Alice, the possibility pleased her: that he might, with her, forget all that came before.

"Some things cannot be told," he said after.

Alice tightened the quilts over them, as though the past were a wind.

"Shall we?" asks Edwin, as he and Mary pause before mounting the steps to Samuel's house.

"Here we are," she says, as if that alone were assent. "Central Park West."

Samuel is at his best with women, Mary thinks, as she watches him across the room with Alice, his head inclined, all slowness and attention. How wrong she and Edwin had been not to have encouraged him to remarry sooner. He should not have been alone all those years after Alma died. Alone as far as people knew (Mary inserts a space for his life across the road, behind the closed doors of the Whiting house, and in the New Haven boardinghouse, and goodness knows what other places he traveled). Alone, after Alma's parents had called the day a day, and Maud was tucked into bed, and Nellie had finished in the kitchen and gone home. Samuel stayed awake, next to the light that glowed in the big front window, reading with his chair pushed back and his feet up on the table. Other nights, he sat at the table leaning over his account books. And in the summer, when she took the dishtowel out to hang it over the porch rail and stood very still, she could hear the creak of his rocking chair out on the porch, and through the lilac bush she could make out Samuel's silhouette, as though the creaking illumined the chair and its inhabitant.

How clever Edwin had been to build the house where a lilac bush already stood: an atheist's prayer, she thought; his salute to nature's pace. She looked for Samuel through its branches. If she could hear him and see him, she realized late one summer, he must know that she was there, too. Hello Samuel, said the scrape of her kitchen door, where it scratched gray arcs into the floorboards. Mary, she understood the creak of his reply. Hello, dear Mary.

Sometimes she wondered what it was that had kept them both from crossing the road late at night. Neither of them ever lacked things to say. Perhaps for him it was no comfort to hear the noises of his brother's house. At least not the same sweetness it was for her to know he was there. When he left for good and took Maud with him, she decided that he must not have known of her presence, must never have thought of the nighttime noises as a kind of conversation between them, because otherwise he would not have kept the lamp lit all those nights later on-he could not have meant for her to see him with Nellie like that.

With a woman, he is in his element. She and Edwin should not have been surprised or hurt when he announced that he was moving away. Alma still walked at night there. Edwin said as much. Mary, too, had started out the door and stood, looking across the road and down the hill, realizing she'd come out to tell Alma something. Then she would have to recite the facts: Alma with her cloud of black hair will not walk down these steps again, nor open the door to the porch, nor yell Cocorico, the French rooster's dinner call. She will not answer any call; she will not sneak in the back door and sit at the kitchen table until someone finds her. Still, when she heard Samuel's chair creaking late at night, it seemed to Mary as if Alma's chair moved beside it.

Who inhabited that darkness? In the night, even after Samuel had finally moved away, she liked to stand on the porch listening. Sometimes Nellie left late after tending to Ma Whiting. The world was not small, then.

When we think of someone, Mary wonders, don't they know, wherever they are, whatever far realm is theirs? Aren't the ones we love with us always-Jimmy Roberts, she blushes to think, and looks at Edwin. He brushes something from his boot. She turns away before he catches her eye, and looks back at Samuel. Did he think of Nellie? Of her baby? Instead of Gracie, it is Effie whom Mary sees: a small girl with long brown curls leaning over the basket to admire the sleeping baby. You fit in there once, Mary must have told her. For an instant, Mary sees Effie, looking up from the basket in inquiry, turning from Gracie to her. And then she is gone. Mary cannot imagine her anymore. Only her brown eyes (always they were darkness, even the night she was born, when Mary looked into them and saw the question, Why did you bring me here?)

Though Mary's faith goes so far as to say, The dead are always with us, she is puzzled by her belief. They come down the same staircases and speak in the same mortal voices. But out of time. And if out of time-where? Effie by now or by yesterday grown and aged and born again. The plump sturdiness of a girl about to become woman, unbounded.

Mary watches Alice laugh and Samuel touch her bottom lip-she sees that Alice cannot keep her eyes from him and Samuel's own crinkle with delight-and she feels old, older than she should be, old enough to be his mother and Edwin's both. Well: Hadn't she known them both always? At least since the War's end.

Alice watches Samuel as he shifts and stretches his arms back behind his head: He looks happy, she supposes, and yet is not content herself with that description. Something is different about him tonight. A flavor she's not tasted-something foreign to their lives together. At least Maud is not here to see. Impossible, that would be. Alice could not have stood all of the Elmer family together at once-Samuel's daughter, brother, sister-in-law, all talking about a life she would never know, no matter how long she and Samuel live together. Certainly they would have taken pity on her and narrated the necessary scenes. But without Maud to shift the balance irrevocably toward the past-Why not call it that? It was over and done, wouldn't they see?-they had slipped into the comfortable conventions of civility reserved for dining couples of little intimacy but circumstantial favor: The husband had grown up with Samuel; the wife had been sent an introduction by neighbors. This, Alice could well manage.

"Excuse me."

Samuel's words startle Alice, though she had been waiting for him to speak. But she had thought that he would say something to her. Not this half-swallowed apology directed toward-whom? She had thought he would signal her-fold up his napkin and drop it on his plate, touch he, sleeve-before embarking on the evening's summation, before suggesting easily, but without commitment, future plans. They might take a ride in the park together. He would see about introducing Edwin to Sinclair, who wished to add to his fine collection of paintings.

"Not at all," Mary answers, withdrawing her feet from tinder the table and shifting her chair back.

His feet touched Mary's, Alice thinks. Bony Mary. See that she doesn't break.

"I'll make some room over here-" Samuel hauls his feet out from under the cloth and starts to put them right up on the table with the china plates. "Oh-oh," he laughs, pulling them back just before his heels make a smear of the potatoes. He makes a show of how civilized a clown he is. A thoroughly citified man joking about the country boy he still is at heart.

Mary waves a hand, dismissing Samuel.

Like a mother, thinks Alice. Like a mother clucking disapprovingly over the antics of her beloved son, all the while aglow with the very fact of his existence, that central amazement that cannot be diminished, no matter how bad his behavior.

"Samuel, stop." Alice slaps his thigh. "Now-" She hesitates before suggesting that the men retire to Samuel's study, and in her hesitation, Samuel goes over to the sideboard, takes a bottle from ice, and pulls the cork. She claps her hands together in pleasure.

Slipping the stems of the champagne flutes between the fingers of one hand, he shows off: how beautiful and large his hands, that he can hold the glasses so, barely clinking. The glasses are made insubstantial in his hand, the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun, she knows not which. She watches and thinks, Here is happiness, as he pours from high above each glass a precise cascade of the cold wine.

She sees Edwin and Mary exchange a look: This is what they do; very well, this once.

Yes, Alice silently adds. Let them see us as we are.

When Samuel finishes pouring, he sits back comfortably.

He should say something now. He should welcome her to the family, Mary and Edwin to the city But Samuel acts as though nothing deserves comment, not the filet of their first dinner all together, not having poured champagne-this just another moment in the series of moments that make a dinner or a lifetime. They look into their glasses and concentrate on sipping the champagne, embarrassed for him, Alice thinks, embarrassed that he has not seen the requirements of the moment he himself created. No one asked him to do it!

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Every Past Thing by Pamela Thompson Copyright © 2007 by Pamela Thompson. Excerpted by permission.
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