Next she stopped in the living room. Before stepping onto the lush yellow carpet, she removed her shoes; she should have thought of it earlier. Her tired feet sank into the fabric, sending a thrill up her body. She’d never before understood what people meant about the soles being an erogenous zone. She’d have to experiment with that. She gazed out the picture window—a view for the rich—looked at the items on the tables—museum quality—the whiskey in the bar cart—her tongue puckered—and finally arrived at the coffee table and the box Agnes had sent. She opened it, and when she got a first glance at the contents she realized she’d half been hoping it was a present, a fantasy that seemed pathetic next to the pile of notebooks she lifted from the padded interior. She read the typed note on top.
Dear Maud,
I apologize for not being at the apartment to meet you. I had a setback, and I was afraid you wouldn’t stay in my apartment while you visited your mother if you knew I wouldn’t be there. I want you to stay here. It’s convenient, comfortable, and the price is right.
To make up for my absence, here is my written account of the years 1960–1962. I kept a diary of sorts. In these pages you’ll find out what you have pressed to know about—how I came to write the When Nan books. I think it will be obvious why I want to keep the story private. Don’t open them at all if you feel you might be tempted to discuss them with any other living being. No one else knows about these events, and it is my wish that no one ever will.
I hope you’ll be satisfied, and will stop bothering me about this.
It will make your mother feel better to have you there, whether or not she can express that.
I’m grateful for another day, for writing, and for the sea. How about you?
CHAPTER 17 Agnes, Leeward Cottage, September 1960
Dear Elspeth,
Polly went back down to Philadelphia on Labor Day, on the conventional schedule. Her departure has had the effect of making our father’s death more real. All summer Polly supplied funny anecdotes about him and listened to me talk about him ad infinitum. She wept with me when I needed that. I was able to keep him close, because he existed between us.
Now I am alone with my thoughts of him, and because I cannot arouse a laugh from my own grief-lined innards, I am bereft again. And while I understand that Polly has her own life to live, and children to care for, a stubborn part of me insists that she was mine first, and she should be with me. There is no mourning ritual for the loss of the decades-long exclusive status we enjoyed in each other’s lives. Friends must stand aside and understand. I am an adult, so I do, truly. Yet I also recognize that I am left solitary while she is surrounded. True, I wouldn’t want to be surrounded in the way she is. I certainly wouldn’t want to answer to Dick. Polly is smarter than he by a mile, and the lengths she goes to disguise that fact make me—I was going to say nauseous, but the truth is the spectacle makes me angry. Eve was smarter than Adam. What if God had applauded her curiosity, and ordered the world accordingly? Or was it the Bible’s authors who altered the truth to the end of consolidation of male power? Writers!
I’m free. I’ll personally make it up to Eve by ordering my world solely according to my intelligence. I have ideas just beginning to form that could take fine shape if I were to develop them with the help of a mind I know and trust. Do you remember my old dream of joining with another soul in love and work? I recall thinking about it from about age twelve, but where did I get such a notion? It certainly wasn’t from observing our parents, who couldn’t have been less united, and whose work, such as it was, was unknown to each other. It can’t have been from anyone else we knew either, could it? Though I believe that Miss Hardy and Miss Wordsworth may have had such a bond, unsung though it was. The Boston marriage, as Henry James called it. Love, hidden in plain sight, under the guise of the practicality of sharing the expenses of a house. We didn’t know, did we, El? We knew very little about love at all.
Then, one day, we did know. But how? How does one wake up with an answer on a new day to a question that has seemed hopelessly daunting the day before? What problem-solving elves go to work in the night? I’m sure there is a scientific or psychological explanation for how this happens, but I’m not going to go in search of it. Instead, I’ll tell you what the elves did for me last night while I slept.
Early this morning I threw open my window and the ocean air rolled in, and suddenly I saw a way to connect with a sympathetic consciousness. The elves had given me the idea of writing to you. Isn’t that brilliant? We have always been so close, the only distance that has ever come between us is the inevitable one that no human can control. You would say you are with God. I, as you well know, don’t believe that—and my disbelief affords me the option of thinking that, in some way, you are here with me.
I hope this is all right with you. The interruption may be a lot worse than calling down the hall for you to get up from bed to bring me a glass of water, as I used to horribly do. What a bully I could be! I intend to make this worthwhile for you, however. I am planning to report on a subject neither of us has ever experienced—what it is like to be here after the season is over. I know you’re curious! We’ll discover it together. I will write about everything important that happens, and the fresh discoveries I make. I promise I won’t interrupt heavenly peace too much. You don’t mind, do you? But why do I even say that? I already know you don’t. You always made me feel as though I was all right just as I was. You even had a way of making room for me to feel beautiful, which I never was nor will be. You were the beautiful sister. If you hadn’t been so good that might have been annoying. You were good, though—the best.
I’ll tell you a story you haven’t heard that makes the point. Shortly before he died, when Daddy was no longer in the present, he sometimes struggled to sit up and look around.
“Where’s the angel?” he asked.
“She went ahead,” I answered. “You’ll see her soon.”
“Soon.” He always dozed off after that exchange. Soothed.
So, Elspeth, I thank you for being here with me now. This will be fun, I swear.
You already know the lay of the land so I don’t have to explain that to you. What’s new is a neighbor called Virgil Reed, who comes with a small daughter, name of Nan. He’s younger than I, maybe thirty? I haven’t been close to him so I can’t tell for sure. He and Nan were the subject of dozens of my conversations with Polly this summer—now you will be my confidante. They are living in the Chalet, if you can believe it. In recent years Polly’s boys have used it as a playhouse, just as we did. Robert Circumstance has fallen in with them, and before the Reeds’ arrival the four boys and their friends swarmed it constantly. They were grumpy this summer that it was occupied and built an alternative fort, but it wasn’t as magical and without having an imaginative retreat house, they played differently. They grew up.
The Chalet must be eighty years old. The current Reeds have been there since early spring, surviving with only that small woodstove for heat. I don’t know why Ben Reed didn’t simply allow them to stay inside Rock Reed. He never comes—he hasn’t been here in at least twenty years. Rock Reed is a tomb now. Maybe Virgil Reed doesn’t want to stay inside, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Maybe in spite of its condition it’s too grand for him. He seems terminally anti-materialistic. He has the most ramshackle car I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot up here, and no apparent job. He looks like he was just released from a typhus-ridden Confederate hospital—that’s how bearded and emaciated he is. Our mother would call him a poor relation, as she called Ben Reed a remittance man. She had no use for the Reeds. Remember when Virgil’s parents were killed in a plane crash? I vaguely remember them, and Virgil and his sister, too. What an odd bunch, the Reeds. I say that based on the fact that they rarely came to FP, which I consider to be the oddest thing in the world! Who wouldn’t come here, if you could? Uncle Ian said that when Ben dies, Virgil Reed will inherit Rock Reed and be a shareholder in the Fellowship. So I suppose I will get to know him someday. We will have to vote our shares and therefore discuss issues. Little else has been said about him. Polly pegs him as an artist or a composer. I hope so, if only to explain his behavior. His head is in the clouds.