Should she send the packet back to Robert? He had written her a beautiful condolence note. She may not even have written back, not properly. The DILs had helped her send out cards. That was the best she could do. It was one of her intentions for the summer to write back to people more fully.
She’d sorted through the business involving the houses and the taxes and asked questions of her boys until she learned what she needed to know now to manage things herself. James wanted her to sign a power of attorney, but she’d always managed the checkbook and the household finances. “I understand, Ma,” James said, “but it’s time for you to just rest.” Who did he think she was? Didn’t he remember her running around after all of them, all those years? Organizing their schedules, making certain they got their homework done, throwing baseballs and footballs, endless driving, driving, driving. Plus, managing the money. “I don’t want to rest,” she said. “Just go over these papers with me so you know what is happening, too.” James put this off, and it was Theo who ended up sitting over the accounts with her. She’d have gone to him in the beginning, but James would have been wounded if she’d skipped over him. Was it true that therapy could sort out these ancient jealousies? If so, she wished he’d go.
Back from town she walked down through the lupines and unmown brown winter grass to the water. The islands farther out were socked in by the sea gray. A pillar of pale smoke rose from Agnes’s chimney, and the straight pine on the water’s edge struck its lonely pose. She lay down on the rocks. No one would see but maybe Agnes, who would surely understand—and leave her alone. Polly made croaking noises. Dick, Dick! Tide, take me. Take me to him.
Songs came, hymns. He’d always made fun of her voice, so she sang, now, for his mockery. “Bring me my bow of burning gold. Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. Way down yonder, in the meadow, poor little baby’s crying Mama…”
She rolled to her side. She was alive to see the white sky, how she loved a white sky! Gulls hung frozen overhead, who knew how? The same old lobster buoys and the boom of the ocean and the whistles in the treetops had confounded her all her life—they were too beautiful. Way too beautiful for now, when she was smeared with sorrow.
She pushed herself up. Pain; blood. She’d cut her hand on a barnacle. Her hand found her mouth, the blood tasted clean and rich. As she licked her wound, she marveled that Robert Circumstance hadn’t known Dick was dead right away. But he hadn’t known and so had kept writing. He’d been writing to a living man while she was already in her weeds, and he’d gone on writing way after Dick was in the ground. She envied him for that. She hadn’t had a minute of delusion. She and Nessie and Elspeth had made a joke once upon a time, when they learned about Freud. Denial is a river. Her grandchildren told her everyone knew that joke, but she informed them it had been made up right here, on the Point. She wished she were in that river now, but she was only at her seaside, lying on the rocks, an unwild old woman.
She rolled onto her knees and awkwardly pushed herself up. God, it had gotten hard. She had to spread her legs and squat, push her hands against the ground, then squeeze her thighs taut. She slogged through the high grass, resoaking her pants.
The pale blue sky was pinking by the time she went back inside. A newspaper sat on the kitchen counter and Polly picked it up. A raccoon had bitten a child, everyone should be on the lookout. Hamm Loose Jr. had bought another property on the coast. Polly ignored the casserole Shirley had left and instead cracked two eggs against the edge of a skillet and drew them back and forth across the hot steel with a spatula. Eggs and an English muffin with orange marmalade. Same old. She ate standing up then soaped her plate. Three books on her shelf were possibles to keep her company later: The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, and Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She pulled them all down, and their lonesome content weighed on her hands. She put them back and chose Jane Eyre. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be better to be here. Perhaps nothing would ever be good again.
She opened the book to find her marginalia. Her Miss Dictor’s connected script.
* * *
When she learned that writing marginalia was a legitimate response to a book, she read with a pencil in hand, noting the parts where the women wrote pining letters and eagerly ripped open the replies, and the parts where their hopes were dashed and they wept into the crooks of their arms. She loved the loneliness that walked alongside love, eager to waylay and suffocate it at any moment. An examination of the women around her showed no signs of a secret life. Was it so rare? To be sure of having one, she had enacted the signs herself: long walks in the rain, a diary hidden beneath her underwear in her chest of drawers, and when she could get hold of a candle, wax dripped on the back of her own letters to friends. None of these were remarked on, but she cultivated them just the same, for a little while. But by the time she was fourteen, Polly had educated herself enough in the possibilities of love to know that what she wanted wasn’t the grief that leveled her favorite heroines but the deeply loving marriages that belonged to many of the minor characters in her books. She wanted to fall in love once and to stay in love forever. A marriage built on love that comprehends seemed to her the pinnacle of human potential, and something even a person like her—quiet, pretty not beautiful—could have. She wasn’t a subject for romantic tragedy. That was fine with her. What made for enthralling reading didn’t seem so appealing in life.
Ian and Posy Hancock, her parents, conveyed without ever saying a word against him that Dick Wister wasn’t what they’d imagined for Polly. They didn’t have to. Her entire upbringing told her so, especially the guiding principle of her childhood household that it was imperative for women to be gay and social and bring light into the world—a philosophy that weighed against the brooding addition of a future professor of philosophy to the family. Just as they didn’t voice their objections, no doubt assuming that their mild rightness would hold sway, Polly didn’t explain herself. No one wanted a scene. All she could have said, anyway, was that she adored Dick. Her family mitigated the detour in their plans with the fact that he was from a decent Quaker family—as Polly had known they would.
He courted her casually, an attitude she found suave. He was as ardent as anyone, she explained to her friends, it was just that he was squeamish about showing it. He got taken up by ideas, taken up and away, as if he’d climbed into the basket of a hot-air balloon and lifted into the sky, except the balloon was his mind and the flame was an idea and the sky was the universe. Once she teased him by asking which came first, the absentmindedness or the professor? Poor thing, he hadn’t much of a sense of humor. He walked off to ponder this.
“Dickie!” She ran after him. “I’m joking!”
“Oh!” He looked at her curiously, as he might look at a dog that suddenly spoke. She wasn’t sure he’d like this side of her, but from then on he mostly appreciated her wit; it wasn’t a trait he considered truly essential, so he wasn’t competitive about lacking it. Over time, he learned some humor from her, and developed the ability to recognize even the driest jokes, which made her feel she’d brought him along. She also brought money into the marriage, though he didn’t care about that. He was in the clouds, conjuring up fresh dilemmas and sorting them through. Did animals feel? Did evil exist? What was free will? Or freedom? Or will? Questions she could answer in a snap took him years. He explained that his questions weren’t like a regular person’s, and nor were his answers. He made inquiries, and came up with proofs—which, after months of toil, often ended up in the same place as what she had believed all along. Ah, but he could argue and back up his point, whereas she could only say what she felt. Making sense without proof was ultimately useless, according to Dick. Proof reigned supreme. Feelings, common sense, and intuition—until he made an inquiry into their nature, they were in the limbo of phenomena that might not actually exist. “Old bear,” she teased. My own old bear.