More airlines spring into being. A United Airlines Boeing 247 explodes over Indiana. The first bombing of a passenger plane. No one ever figures out who did it or why.
A great blankness settles in Marian. Never has she been so idle. She has no daydreams, no ambitions. Once in a long while, Caleb comes and finds her out on the ranch, startling her, carrying her old life on him like a scent.
Dear Marian,
I have moved across the harbor to Vancouver proper. I’m afraid Geraldine and I didn’t part on good terms. I disappointed her, but I could not have done otherwise. I am sorry about it, though.
* * *
—
Jamie lives in a rooming house on a block of Powell Street where unruly Gastown begins to subside into tidy Japantown. His accommodations are not a private home like Geraldine’s but a grimy three-story building between a billiard hall and a Japanese barbershop.
Relief in the grit and anonymity of this new iteration of life, in the rowdy city bustle, the Gastown beer parlors and loggers’ hiring halls, the clanging, whirring streetcars and huffing freight trains, the Japanese greengrocers and noodle counters, the inscrutable signs and chockablock window displays just to the south in Chinatown.
Perhaps he might dip a toe into the nightlife. Perhaps away from the dark influence of Wallace’s house he can have a few drinks and not lose track of things. Being free of Geraldine makes him miss her, but the missing feels dangerous, needs to be dispelled. He needs to be touched, needs new memories to lay over the old.
A few bleary nights, a quick and queasy encounter with a prostitute.
He paints street scenes, harbor scenes. Once a week he gives drawing lessons to a rich widow, arranging still lifes of fruit and flowers for her to render with timid, fussy lines. He falls in with some other members of the Boar Bristle Club, all men in their twenties, most barely scraping by. Two teach at the art school, a few have had work in traveling exhibitions or won museum purchase prizes. They critique each other’s work, but mostly they drink together. He asks them about Judith Wexler and they tease him mercilessly—She’d eat you for lunch! There be dragons, lad! Abandon all hope, ye who enter her!—without telling him anything of use.
He writes to Marian:
I have a feeling I have reached a juncture full of consequences that can’t be anticipated but will later seem inevitable. Should I embrace a bohemian life as a temporary lark or resist it as a trap? I’m afraid of being sucked under as Wallace was （as I nearly was）， but to live without any fun at all seems too extreme a precaution and also discouraging to the making of art. I want love but not a wife, not yet. I want drink but not dissolution. I want momentum but not to careen. I suppose what I want is some kind of equilibrium, but I suppose I want the thrill of tipping back and forth, too. Do you know what I mean? Maybe not—you’ve always been one for single-minded pursuit. Maybe the answer is in painting. It’s true that when I’m working is when I’m most at peace.
Happy birthday.
* * *
—
They are nineteen. Marian, by this time, is pregnant. Her monthly blood had been irregular for months because she has gotten so thin, but she knows even so. Her breasts throb as though the skin might rip. She manages to hide her nausea from Barclay, knows she can’t keep the secret for long.
How stupid she’d been, how passive and superstitious and wishful and ridiculous: an earthbound ghost wandering among the trees, a breeding sow waiting in the bedroom. She had wondered, in spite of herself, if there might be some truth to Barclay’s certainty that the moment of conception would convince her of her destiny as a mother, but instead the meeting of sperm and egg had been the formation of that first ice crystal on the surface of a lake from which a solid, unbroken pane blooms and feathers out to the encircling shore. She peers down through it into the black depths of herself and does not hate the floating mote of life suspended there but will not pity it, either.
No denying anymore that Prohibition is bound to end. Barclay’s associates have been coming to Bannockburn to discuss what to do. “Cattlemen,” he tells his mother. “Come to talk cattle.”
“They’re bootleggers,” Marian whispers to Mother Macqueen, leaning over her chair. “Your son is a criminal, as you well know.” But Mother pretends not to hear, hums as she knits.
Barclay is loath to relax his surveillance of his wife and seldom leaves the ranch, but once in a while business keeps him away overnight. Marian waits. She has no real plan, only her will, which has returned to her like a wayward hawk coming to the glove.