Agnes set the plate on the table in the hallway and moved to her guard post on the chaise. The water was motionless and etched with reflections of boat masts. She breathed the scents of brine, seaweed, and fish. Intoxicants.
When she’d gotten up to Maine six weeks earlier, Agnes had gone to see William Oswald, her oncologist in Portland, who’d told her she had between a 70 and 75 percent chance of a five-year and onward survival if she did nothing further. Radiation and chemo would improve her chances but negatively affect her quality of life in the present. Dr. Oswald’s point of view was that death was natural, and that chemo was a lot for an old body to handle. His advice to her was to live a healthy life, as she was used to doing. She was grateful to him for not being spooky about death and was happy to play the odds to avoid the poisons.
She’d been getting stronger and feeling more robust, but her novel was still a joke, albeit a private one. Her writer’s block—awful phrase—was confounding and painful, and she couldn’t tell a soul about it. Her letters and her gardening column for a syndicate of New England papers—written under a pseudonym, Gertie Weedie—flowed, as always, so it wasn’t that she couldn’t write at all. It was her Franklin women who eluded her in their old age. There was nothing to do but keep at it. Do what she’d always done. She wasn’t going to start in on a memoir, that was for sure. That had been an easy decision, dispatched in a postcard. Maud Silver hadn’t reared her head again.
Her condition was one of comfortable desolation. She was never lonely when she was in a book, no matter how solitary her existence, but this stasis made her aware that others were enjoying themselves, and she envied that—even as she disdained their enjoyments. She was somewhat mollified by working on When Nan Wrote a Book About a Friendly Bear, a sly nod to the academics who’d elevated her status.
It helped that Polly was back. Agnes liked having her next door and counted on their routine of meeting every late afternoon. They knew each other so well that their speech was as vertical in nature as a good poem, and a glance could stand for a dialogue.
The night before, as they spun around the graveyard, Agnes had complained of her physical limitations.
“I have dinosaur arms now.” She hung them in front of her at rib height, like a tyrannosaurus.
“Remember my mother used to walk around that way? Carrying her dangling hands in front of her.”
“Like Frankenstein,” Agnes said. “If he bent his elbows.”
They wandered over to Posy Hancock’s grave. It was comforting to have known each other’s family so well, and the ambiance of each other’s house. The Hancocks’ atmosphere was gentle, thanks to Posy, a mild, pleasing person who’d lived in a mild pleasant version of the world because everyone went out of their way not to upset her, for fear of seeing a reflection of their own imperfections mar her tranquil face. Even her snobbish and limited husband, Ian Hancock, had been sweet with Posy. Polly missed her, and from the foot of her plot spoke to her as if she were still alive.
“Why did you carry your hands that way, Mummy?”
“Did she answer?” Agnes teased.
“Yes. She said it was to provide a role model for thee, Agnes Lee.”
“Har har.”
Polly also stopped before Lydia’s grave, as always, but she never said anything there, not in front of Agnes. Similarly, Agnes stopped by Virgil Reed’s grave, and Nan’s, though in hers there was no body present. Polly in turn left Agnes alone with these private, deep griefs. They were open with each other about visiting and talking to Elspeth and Edmund, Agnes’s younger twin siblings, and Teddy, Polly’s younger brother, and Lachlan Lee, head of the Point for so long, and they shook their heads over Grace Lee’s insistence on being buried in Philadelphia. Who would want that?
As if to cement the point, a golden eagle soared overhead, toward the Sank.
“So what day should I set up a luncheon?” Agnes had asked. She’d already told Polly that she’d made contact with several land trusts. They were falling over themselves at the prospect of Fellowship Point.
Polly visored her eyes and looked up at the sky. “Soon. I have to talk to Dick.”
“That’s what you said months ago. You still haven’t done it?”
Maisie brushed against her legs, as she did when she sensed Agnes was upset.
“I brought it up.” Polly looked at Meadowlea.
“What did he say?”
“Not much.”
Agnes felt her blood come up hot and angry in her jaw. “Come on, Polly. We have to get on this.”
“He’s not doing very well, Nessie. Retiring wasn’t easy for him. Then he had the TIA…” Her chin quavered.
“Well, I’m sorry for all that, truly, but none of it matters to the eagles. Do I have to play the cancer card to get you to agree to a meeting? Because I will.” Sometimes, Agnes wanted to throttle Polly for the exact opposite reason as the gulls. They were too much; she, too little.
Polly looked stricken and her eyes filled. “You think I haven’t played it already? I think about it every minute of every day! I’m frantic about it! I can’t lose you both!”
“I’m sorry,” Agnes said quickly.
“You should be. Sheesh.” Polly reached up and threaded her arms into the sleeves of her sweater.
“I am.”
The subject had changed after that. Agnes would have to try again later. Why was everything up to her?
She cringed. That was one of her mother’s queries of the universe, never uttered with the irony her family heard in it. Cosseted Grace Lee. Lately she’d been swimming up through the dark aquifer of Agnes’s subconscious, asking for attention, as if she’d figured out that Agnes’s block was a chink in her defense against memories of her mother. It was hard to believe there was anything left to say about her beyond what Agnes had already worked into her novels in a disguised form, where judgmental, forbidding, narcissistic mothers reappeared over and over. But there was always more, wasn’t there? Recomposing the familiar was apt to expose a fresh interpretation. Memory was hazy and capricious, but bearing down on a memory with words, examining it with all the senses and representing time with light and technique, this shook up the past, unfixed it, kneaded it, and bent it into a new shape.
Sitting alone at her desk, or on her chaise writing in her journal, she went deep into life. She felt vividly involved with the entire world when she was writing. Alone, literally, yet she was choosing words with the intention that they serve as stepping stones between herself and the mind and heart of another person. It was a miracle that this was possible. Small black marks on a page, a code called the alphabet, and she could read a story written hundreds of years earlier, or write a book read thousands of miles away. Why get excited about gods and ghosts when writing and reading were so supernatural?
When she was with another person, the choice of words wasn’t so crucial. She could point to a flower and smile, and trust that her appreciation had been communicated. But she couldn’t write the word flower and expect a reader to know what she meant. What flower? Red, white, yellow, blue? What size, what scent, what season? To draw a scene wholly from her mind and draw it well enough that a stranger might see it, too—this was her way of living, and it didn’t seem any less active than commanding troops or performing a surgery. Or having children.