“Thank you, thank you, I know you will.” Agnes stood, hoping they’d take the hint. Suddenly she was desperate to get back to her desk. “I’ll be fine, really. But I’m a little tired now. The doorman will get you a cab. Mrs. Blundt, will you call downstairs for a cab for Polly?”
After several minutes of entreaties and embraces and assurances Agnes was finally alone again.
As soon as she stepped into her study, she felt relief. Where her bedroom was made sumptuous by snowy duvets over fat quilts and a chaise longue upholstered in white silk, her aesthetic here was what she thought of as spare inspiration. She’d modeled it on the cells in the Conventi di San Marco in Florence and had a replica of a Fra Angelico fresco painted on each wall by an art student from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Her hand was no longer steady enough to do the job herself—not that she’d ever had the skill to copy a master. She was an outsider artist at most, untrained and quirky. An illustrator. She appreciated good paintings, though—who didn’t? Fra Angelico had made her burst into overwhelmed tears when she was on her post-collegiate European tour.
She had a comfortable reading chair, a desk, a few lamps. A computer and a printer. Supplies. If she wanted to look something up, she went to her bedroom, where she kept two cases of books, mainly reference. In her study there was nothing to do but write and think. She’d always wanted just such a simple room, but it took starting from nothing, and acquiring a space devoid of any architectural interest, to do it right. She loved the space and exonerated it from any blame for the fact that her book eluded her. Though if, as she conceived it, the empty room was a true extension of her mind, what it presently reflected was the image of a ghost. Cancer was general all over Agnes’s breasts. She wished she could say that to someone who’d laugh in response. But she knew no such person.
And no one wholly knew her. Her books were independent of her charisma—har har—and literary friendships, as she had none. Franklin Square Seven, the book she presently wasn’t writing, would most likely be the final volume in the series. The Franklin Square women couldn’t get any older than they’d be in this book and still be able to turn a plot. She planned to tie up all remaining questions and leave her characters be. No more traumas and dramas. Peace at last.
She’d been looking forward to this for a very long time, but was presently afraid it wasn’t going to happen. Maybe the series had ended with Book Six, when the Franklins were in their seventies and reluctantly harboring grandchildren and arguing with adult children and taking big trips. The book had been well received, and Pauline had gotten good reviews and lots of mail, but Agnes had finished it with the sense that she was at last on the cusp of a breakthrough, and of ensuring her work be read beyond her death. So far the Franklins had lived their lives, and she’d charted their hopes and travails and the changes in society astutely. In the last volume, she would make her points. Say what she had to say. Offer up her final words of wisdom. That sounded good in theory—who didn’t want the last word?—but the pressure to be profound without being didactic or polemical was daunting, at her age, with no further opportunity to correct herself. She had to get it right. Surely that was part of what was stopping her from getting it at all. Perfectionism. Followed by death.
Which brought her back to Hiram, and Fellowship Point, and Robert’s letter describing his walk around the land honoring his father. She closed her eyes and retraced his steps, starting at the Rookerie where he looked down Point Path toward the Sanctuary and then walking forward, past all the houses sleeping now through the winter—Outer Light, Rock Reed, her own Leeward Cottage. She paused there to look over at the graveyard, the stones flat and imbedded in the earth, barely visible from her vantage point, and then at the Meeting Ground where the ancestors had gathered to affirm their values, and occasionally spoke aloud when moved to do so in their hearts. She walked past Meadowlea and pictured Polly on her terrace, and on past WesterLee, the house her great-grandfather had assigned to his brother, dutifully giving away the best location on the peninsula.
Then into the Sank, the place her father had always called “God’s country” and where Agnes had gone thousands of times to reset her balance and to affirm what was truly important in life. Thirty-three acres of land devoted to the safety of the birds that nested there and the birds that stopped by on their migrations, and to the cultivation of native woodland flora and trees. It wasn’t wild. Hiram and Robert and their crew swept up the needles and pruned back invasive undergrowth and tended the soft paths threaded through the trunks, leading to vistas of deep woods and, in spots, distant islands, and to quiet glens and discreet spots for contemplation or rest. Moose had been spotted there, regrettably not by Agnes, but she kept track of the eagles and had friends among the squirrel families generation after generation. Sometimes she could draw on the beauty so wholeheartedly that she felt as though she had metabolized it, and that it had become an organ inside of her. The next time she was actually among the pines, though, she was apt to be embarrassed that she’d thought she was capable of comprehending what was, by nature, beyond her. Either way, she was determined to keep it safe for the birds, the animals, the flowers, the trees. More than ever, the world needed places free of human notions. She knew what people were like, herself included, and she wanted to make sure the Sank was protected by humans from humans. That would be her great legacy for which she wanted no credit. Anonymity had become ingrained.
She glared at the large manila envelope that had arrived with the mail and pulled out the contents. As she guessed, it was someone’s PhD thesis on the subject of When Nan. Agnes sighed. This one was called “Performing Non-Traditional Gender in the When Nan Oeuvre.” By Mariana Wiccan Styles. Of the University of South Lawrence. Wherever that was.
Wiccan? That couldn’t be real, could it? Or—hippie parents.
When Penn had first asked for her papers, Agnes had laughed. Poor wretch who had to laboriously catalogue her sketches, and notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes. Little had Agnes known that children’s books had become a respectable area of academic inquiry. Every year dozens of requests came in from scholars who wanted to have a look at her papers. Apparently, her character, her protagonist, her heroine, a child called Nan, had become a proto-feminist icon of interest on campus. How could that be? Agnes could see someone eking out a column to that effect that the next morning would be wrapping fish. But a thesis? For which one had to prepare by learning foreign languages and writing rigorous papers on far more heady subjects? Yet the When Nan theses started arriving, and Agnes paged through a few of them, learning all about the symbol systems she’d created, the power structures she’d dismantled, the empowering messages conveyed by Nan’s oblivion to issues of sexual oppression and sexist hierarchies in the workplace.
No one opposed Nan’s personhood.
Her travails were circumstantial, not endemic.
One earnest PhD candidate had noted: “It’s as if Agnes Lee had no awareness whatsoever that women might be considered lesser. She writes as if equality were a fact.” Well, yup. Was that really so unusual? The authors she loved all believed women were equal. She had a shelf of books she reread over and over, and that concept was intrinsic to them all. The difference with her was the blind eye she turned to inequity. Her true feeling was not that women were equal, as that in itself was a comparison, but that they were whole. Wasn’t that indisputable?