“Maybe you will someday.”
A melancholy Madonna smile. “I don’t think they’d be very impressed by me.”
They would find her alien, daunting, prim. They wouldn’t know how to be around her. It didn’t matter. This—what was between him and Sarah—was his. “They don’t know anyone like you.”
“I don’t know anyone like them. I wish I were more like them.”
This was the moment to tell her everything he’d left out. Wallace’s drinking. Barclay Macqueen. The creak of the porch’s screen door in the night, when Caleb came for Marian. But instead he kissed her again.
* * *
—
When he could, he made drawings of her, sometimes from life, sometimes from memory. Some he gave to her, some he kept. “I love these because I love thinking about you looking at me,” she said. “It’s a very particular kind of vanity.”
* * *
—
Occasionally, when Sarah and Alice were both out, Mrs. Fahey invited him for afternoon coffee in a small glassed-in conservatory that was her particular domain. To get to it, he passed through a parlor that also seemed to be her own. There was no art in these rooms. The walls of her parlor were clean and white, sparsely hung with photographs of her family. Her conservatory held potted ferns, a dog cushion, and a round marble table with wicker chairs where they sat. She asked him many of the same questions Sarah had about his life, but since he was not consumed with romantic anxiety and carnal longings, he could relax more into his account of himself, find opinions he hadn’t quite known he possessed.
“I wish my sister were more ladylike,” he surprised himself by saying one day.
Mrs. Fahey smiled with a deeper melancholy than Sarah’s. “Why? Does she want that, too?”
“No, she doesn’t,” he said frankly. “But her life seems so much more difficult than it needs to be. If she had a girl’s haircut and wore girls’ clothes, and if she’d kept going to school and didn’t care so much about airplanes, everything would be simpler.” At Trout’s funeral, when Barclay Macqueen had turned around to shake Jamie’s hand, there had been something sneering and triumphant in his face, as though Jamie were a bested rival. Peace be with you.
“Yes,” Mrs. Fahey agreed. “It probably would be.”
“If she’d had a mother, would she have turned out this way? Do you think?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Mothers don’t control everything, though sometimes we’d like to. I’ve learned—too slowly, but I have learned—that attempts to control others are likely to backfire. I worked for the passage of Prohibition because I earnestly believed women’s lives would be better—easier, as you say—if their husbands couldn’t go out and drink their paychecks away and come home and do the vile things drunk men sometimes do. But I was na?ve. People’s wishes for their own lives tend to outweigh others’ ideas about how they should behave.” She paused. “We must bend in the wind sometimes, Jamie. So much is beyond our control.”
Jamie quashed a tremor of impatience that he couldn’t explain things better, not to this woman sitting in her glass room, serene in her belief that his doting uncle had sent him to Seattle for a summer with his cousins. “Marian doesn’t always see the problems she’s creating for herself.”
“Is it that you think if she were more ladylike you wouldn’t have to worry about her?”
“I don’t know.”
She leaned forward. “Would you draw her for me? Your sister? I’d like to see what she looks like.”
So he summoned Marian from a blank page. He forced himself to draw her as she was, with her cropped hair and her sharp, almost insolent gaze. As he drew, he felt a tug deep in his guts, like he’d swallowed a hook and the reel was back in Montana.
Mrs. Fahey looked at the drawing for a long time. “Yes, I see. She’s formidable.” She sighed and patted his forearm. “You’ve had to take care of each other more than most children and grow up quickly. It must have been very hard sometimes.”
When he was safely in the attic, he sat on the floor and wept. He had not known how badly he had wanted someone to say exactly that.
* * *
—
During a spell of unusual heat in the third week of August, the art expert from UW came, a sprightly man in a bow tie who proceeded rapidly along Hereford House’s walls, stooping one moment and stretching on tiptoe the next, peering through his spectacles as though his whole body were a kind of specially designed art-evaluating scope. From time to time he jotted in a notebook. Jamie followed along, offering what insight he could, all of which the expert greeted either with irritable mm-hmms or silence.