Now Heidi crouched in front of the brick wall and helped Clemmie crawl up onto her back. Clemmie gave Heidi a good kick in the flanks, which made Heidi laugh. Maud was swept with sorrow, watching this happy scene. Whatever had happened to her mother, to render her mind so porous?
They ate outside on the wooden table, lighting candles when the sky dimmed. When the meal was finished, Heidi excused herself to go read.
“Tired, Ma?” Maud saw that a great strain had appeared around her eyes and mouth.
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you reading this week? Anything good?” She glanced over at Clemmie, who was playing quietly now under the table, nearly ready for bed.
Heidi smiled. “Are you doing market research?”
“Nope. Just curious.”
“I’m reading The Emigrants. Also, Cold Mountain. Also, poems.”
“Do you think you’d buy a memoir by Agnes Lee?”
“So this is market research.” Heidi leaned back and laced her hands behind her head.
Maud laughed. “I guess so.”
“Did she write one?”
“Not yet. But I am going to try to convince her to. I asked David if I could pursue it.”
Heidi thought about it. “I used to imagine Agnes Lee all the time. When I read her books, I pictured her handwriting as straight connected printing, old-fashioned. I pictured her looking out a window as she wrote—between sentences, that is.” She shook her head. “I wanted to do everything that Nan did.”
“Me too.”
“You are. You will. I never did anything.”
There was no point refuting this. A discussion would deflate her. Best to let the words dissipate.
“All right, up I go. Good night, Clemmie.” She waved. “Night, Hi,” Clemmie said without turning around.
After Clemmie’s bath Maud read her two Nan books of her choice—Clemmie had all of them in her room—until the small eyes closed. Maud had taught her how to go to sleep, and how to put herself back to sleep at night if she awoke. It was a great accomplishment, but no one wanted to hear about the triumphant work of mothers. It was a taken-for-granted form of labor, worth little to no money. She had to pat her own back for that.
Before she went up to check on Heidi, she opened her laptop. The sounds of the city seeped in over her windowsill—men’s voices, dogs barking, a woman’s smoky laugh, leather scuffing on the sidewalk. She never wanted to leave this house.
Emails from Mary that made it clear she was still in the office. Maud rolled her eyes.
An email from David.
Maud. Your idea is good, as you know. But we are a children’s book imprint, so we can’t do the book. I’m sorry to disappoint you. There are other ways to go about this, however, and New York is full of people who have traveled an individual path toward the future they desire. If I were your age with your determination to be an editor, I’d propose the idea to Agnes Lee, work with her on the manuscript, and then I’d ask my boss to introduce me to people who’d be interested. That is an entirely plausible scenario and can be pursued in the evenings.
Meanwhile, a boxed set of When Nan is a smart idea. Think of who we can get to write an introduction.
D.
He liked it. But he couldn’t give her the go-ahead. Instead he was pushing her out of the nest, or teaching her how to fly out on her own. She knew she better start right in before she scared herself out of trying.
She made a list of pros and cons from Agnes’s point of view, and the only pros were A, it was an interesting project—maybe, and B, Agnes could make a personal statement that would seal her legacy as an author for the ages—if she cared about that. Maud had the feeling that Agnes wouldn’t be moved by either one, especially without a contract. What might move her was Maud’s original idea—a memoir would sell the series. Pure business, nothing abstract or lofty. Nan was decidedly down-to-earth; Maud guessed Agnes admired that mode of behavior.
Maud considered the best approach. She could pretend David had agreed to the idea, but that would backfire. The only sure way forward was to be honest about the circumstances and the gamble this would be. She had nothing to lose by trying. She placed her fingers on her keyboard and began to draft.
PART TWO A Concern
CHAPTER 4 The Lees, Philadelphia and Fellowship Point, the 1870s
THE LEES WERE QUAKERS, FRUGAL AND PLAIN, OR SO THEY considered themselves. They didn’t decorate like rich people. Their rugs were so thin you could see the wood underneath, and their upholstery had faded from decades of sun and was torn by generations of children. These defects were invisible to the family until that rare moment when someone had a piece recovered—for example, a bedroom slipper chair had been revamped in the 1930s in an art deco diamond pattern, a change under discussion for the next thirty years—but the ethos was nostalgic and historical. On the first day of every summer when the present iteration of the family arrived, the children ran through the house pointing and exclaiming, deeply thrilled by the familiar. They took old sweaters out of cedar chests and set up their rooms and looked through their journals from previous summers. Especially loved was the wicker in the glass room and on the porches, around which piles of paint flakes gathered and were swept away until finally someone thought to repaint.
Wallpaper peeled. Dishes chipped. Silver tarnished. But the underbrush was carefully cleaned beneath the trees in the Sank, and the beds and meadows fed and artfully trimmed to appear Edenically wild.
Since the mid-1870s, the Lees had occupied two of the five large cottages on Fellowship Point, the sizable thumb of the glove called Cape Deel that reached from the coast into the Gulf of Maine. Cape Deel was named, or so went the story, after a deal made between early Scots settlers and the Abenaki, who traded it for the usual assortment of European goods. Why spell it out, however, so the name was changed to Deel, the pair of vowels obfuscating the transaction. The explanation of how the peninsula of Cape Deel had been formed became more cataclysmic over time as the science of tectonic plates and underwater volcanoes and explosions and retreating ice sheets that cast glacial erratics down the coast was proven and accepted. The rock was mainly granite, including a pink variety that became a signature building material of the area. The sight of a pink drive lined with green firs leading to a house with a terrace delineated by a pink wall dripping with ivy and roses in front of a July sparkling sea was the standard set by a rich Philadelphian and copied in whole or in part all over. Mineral rocks were easily found, and generations of children chipped away at them. Mason jars full of brightly colored specimens were a staple of bedroom bookcases and bathroom sills.
For centuries the Cape was the territory of indigenous peoples, who lived on the land without disturbing it very much at all, due to their belief that they belonged to nature rather than the other way around. The Red Paint people arrived by sea and lived along the coast for thousands of years before Europeans figured out how to get there. Then came the Abenaki, a northern band that eventually became five main tribes in Maine. They fished from their birch bark canoes and cooked over fires on the beaches, where artifacts had been found at the sites of their early encampments. One of these was at the tip of Fellowship Point.
People of English and Scottish descent wandered down from the Maritimes and up from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and built Deel Town, a crossroads with wooden houses in either direction. Soon brick buildings indicated more business coming to town, and a few more lanes sprouted off the main road. Along with the local businesses on the street, small farms, cottage industries, and fishing docks dotted around the peninsula supplied all needs. The new settlers disturbed the land more than the indigenous peoples had, but not much, compared to other places along the coast where logs were cleared, sardine canneries built, and cities erected. In the 1850s a few large summer cottages were built on the eastern side of the peninsula, where ocean breezes kept the blackflies and the mosquitos away and the sunrises were magnificent. The point of Cape Deel was still untouched. William Lee changed that.