Lost Nation (55 page)

She reached and caught a side rail and with her other hand tore free the knot under her chin and her hat flew lost behind them. Her hair
flailed her face. She called, “Oh my. Jonathon Astor. What’re we doing?”

“Sailing,” he called. “We’re sailing.”

Five years later they married, little more than a month after they buried her father on a cold but lovely spring day. Clouds in high fleets fleeing the sky. It was the day he first met her mother. A woman wrapped in a thick black shawl over somber old dark clothing. The woman would not take his offered hand and stood with dipped head through his brief burst of condolence and testimony. When he was done, Estelle beside him, he stood a long awkward moment in the silence that lay over all of them, off to the side the huge clump of townspeople and farmers come to bury their doctor. While waiting in the silence that fell after his outburst he had the strange thought that it was a true act of faith for so many to come, so many that trusted the man now dead and buried to keep them from the same fate. Then the woman raised her head and looked upon him. Her face lined and wet and shriven. She studied him, a gaze that ran into and through him. At the time he thought it was the circumstances. He felt Estelle beside him. He felt he was capable of anything. He even believed that was what the woman looking at him saw. So he bent and kissed her cheek. His lips had hardly swept her skin when she turned her face back down, away from him, denying him.

She did not attend the wedding. Which was not a wedding but a civil ceremony of official brevity and then followed by another ceremony also sparse in the church of his parents. Some measure of respect for the so recently dead father of the bride. He did not mind—he’d had his fill of spectacle. But wished it were otherwise for Estelle. Not that she indicated desire for anything otherwise. And by that time he knew her so well as to know that even if her father still lived this was how she’d have wanted it.

Should he have questioned their going from the church and quiet supper afterward to the cobblestone house? Could he have questioned it? Could he have asked his wife to leave her mother alone at such a time? It certainly wasn’t about sex—they long since knew each fold and twist the other was capable of. It wasn’t about privacy—the cobblestone was three stories of rooms of which they might take their choice—the mother
slept alone now in the groundfloor bedroom—the room where she and her husband had always slept and since his death unchanged. But there was this as well—he wanted to live there. From most any point in Geneva a person might look out at the western ridge above the lake and see the house. It was the house of the doctor. So he happily drove his bride back to her house. Where he moved in with her.

Jonathon and Estelle failed also to produce children, the romping merry band of children that had filled his mind. It was not for want of trying. It was a mystery. She struck him as an exceptionally healthy young female in every respect and after several years he surreptitiously examined his own seed on a glass slide and there certainly was an amplitude of life striving beneath the eye he pressed to the eyepiece of the microscope. So they went along. It was not a question of failed pregnancies, of miscarriage. There just were none at all. And so over some years they determined without ever speaking directly of it that theirs would be lives twinned and nothing more, and oddly or not neither seemed sad over this, at least not to the other. In a way they both seemed to hold their youth. Although he would ponder sometimes, out riding the dusty roads of summer, the phaeton gliding behind the team, the story Estelle had told him, once and only once, of how her mother and father came together, and he would turn this over in his mind and wonder if it somehow fell through the woman, this lack of conception. And Jonathon Astor came to believe that this barrenness was a thing passed from mother to daughter, something of the blood, some fragility of constitution. As if his mother-in-law had exhausted in her one late bout the ability of the women of her line to produce children. An anomaly of biology but he’d seen his share of these. And it fit somehow with the tight caustic woman who unfailingly referred to him as Mister Astor as if she would not admit more than one doctor in her life. A woman who could not read nor write but managed her finances with no help and in secrecy. Not so much as if she were hoarding but as if she trusted no one. Although he carried the financial burden for everything that he could see, everything that the household and grounds consumed. The very house and grounds that were not even his but owned wholly by the old woman. Estelle would inherit these upon the woman’s death and he knew Estelle was not the way her mother was. Still, he had as much pride as any man, and it was a bitter spot held deep within that while
the people of the town might see him as a man outstanding and respected, under the roof that was not his own roof he felt always as if he were a vague nuisance.

And then, just as it had for Doctor Warren and his wife, what came was a single miracle child when he was forty-eight and Estelle five years younger—both well past the point of even the remotest hope. When in fact both were in the flush of having brought peace to their union and were not only content but sometimes watching parents struggling with their children and he so well acquainted with the frights, the terrors that children produced for parents, both somewhat relieved to be freed from all that. And then one evening in the quiet of their own room she turned to him and told him and even as she spoke all the chips and cogs of misstep and hesitation and oddity of the past weeks fell into place for him and he stood silent watching his wife until she laughed and told him his mouth was a flytrap.

Alexandra they named her. And that July morning when he wandered the grounds in his silent opening of the day he heard her piped five-year-old voice chasing after him, coming up from the gardens, calling him because she alone among the women rose early like himself. He turned his eyes from the splendor of the lake below and walked to the gate that led into the garden and waited. He did not open the gate but watched her, running up through the dew-wet grass, holding something, her hands cupped out before her, her legs long and feet bare and her hair light blond loose about her face as she ran to him, carrying some treasure, some discovery, some new bit or piece of the world that she was learning and still believed or behaved as if it had been fresh-made, as if the world had sprung into being for her alone. She’d seen him at the gate and cried, “Papa!”

Jonathon stood with his hands loose upon the picket tops of the gate watching her come and he could almost believe that she was correct; this ancient earth had been waiting all along for this creature to inhabit it. Now he could smell bacon and coffee and knew it would not be long, ten minutes perhaps before through a window Estelle would spy them and call for breakfast and he would sit once more across from the old woman and chat with his wife and wipe jam from his daughter’s face. So he swung open the gate and went down on one knee, slowly, feeling the grit of his age in his joints and was swept with sadness—the almost
certain knowledge that while he might live to see his child’s children all odds were against it. He held himself steady with one hand on the gatepost until she was close and then flexed the muscles in his legs and opened both his arms toward her pell-mell run and said, “What is it, Xandra? What’ve you found?”

What she loved about the house were the windows. Great broad tall double hung windows that lined each room, each floor, that could be flung open to the summer air so that the house seemed nearly to float or, in cold or wet weather could be closed and she could stand and watch the weather just beyond the glass, often sliding down against that glass. The windows to her were the heart of the house and so seemed to her an ample and unchanging extension of her husband—the same lightness and security he took her into that first wet-soaked night years before when she opened her eyes and saw him leaning over her and knew she could entrust herself to him entirely. She did not consider herself fortunate or that it was luck; neither did she feel she’d earned it but simply that it came to her as a simple and extraordinary gift. As if the world had opened an otherwise closed hand and revealed itself to her. It was some time before she fully understood that her husband felt the same way—a solitary man eighteen years older than she whom the ladies of the town had given up for bachelorhood.

Perhaps it was the afternoon that he drove her out from their rented lodging in the town up onto the hillside where for an entire spring and summer men had been working to build this house, a house she knew nothing of until she first saw it that early autumn day. Just two years after meeting him. Married twenty-one of the months of those years. And through that spring and summer he’d kept the building of the house secret from her. So they rode up in his doctor’s buggy and she saw the house rising out of the raw ground and what she saw first was not the view or the size of the house or the rudely laid-out gardens and raw plantings but the windows. She had a moment while the buggy was still moving where she wondered if she’d complained too much of the darkness of their rented lodging and then knew it was not so—that he simply knew she needed windows the same way he seemed to know everything
else she needed. Not a bit of this did he feel obligated to provide. But rather offered to her because each knew that the accident that brought them together was too precious to ever be ignored. That both sought each in their own way, always, to honor. Life, they both knew, was accidental and fragile and delicate as breath. So he gave her windows. The house just a place to hold them. Before her feet were even on the ground she knew this. When she turned and met his gaze and the droopy smile that was his for her alone she had said, “Don’t let them put shutters on.”

And he had said, “There are none planned.”

Years later after her daughter was born and she watched the child grow she made a determination, when Estelle was three, perhaps four, to allow her girl to grow up with as much freedom as possible, to abandon the notions of the times—of constraint and overbearing supervision—children as household creatures almost—and allow her the independence of her own mind. She insisted only on two things—education and manners. And even these she allowed the child to discover on her own as much as possible. Largely she was pleased with the results. It did not hurt, and she admitted this to herself, that Estelle was curious and cautious at once, that the girl’s own nature seemed to preclude fashion or any overt fascination with decorum but was a proud bold girl of independent but not flaunting mind. She watched her daughter and wondered how much of this was her method of raising and how much just the nature of the girl. Oftentimes, watching her daughter grow to a woman, she could not help but wonder how different they truly were. If her own circumstances had allowed would she have been as wise as her child. She liked to think so. She believed her child was in a way a lovely second chance for her own life.

She knew Estelle would marry the young surgeon returned from the war before her daughter knew this. It was not, as she knew he believed, that she disliked him. It was that she distrusted other people and was honest enough to admit to herself that it was from fear of being found out—of being unearthed as the uneducated backward woman she believed herself to be. That at the pit of her soul she knew herself to be. She had entrusted herself to her husband and only to him. She could not do it again with another man, ever, in any way. It wasn’t scorn she feared so much as having that pit opened wide within herself and taking
her over. Which she always, each day of her life, feared might happen. She knew her will—and knew that will was not always enough safeguard against the mysterious workings of the world.

And yet the rot seemed to work within her anyway. She knew Jonathon Astor to be a good man and yet could not but keep him at a distance and within that distance she saw she diminished him. But she could not explain herself to him. She wished he understood her silence. But it was not something once in place to breach. Not some idle summer afternoon, not ever. If I could write, she thought, I’d leave him a letter for after my death. But it was not a letter she could dictate to anyone. Not even perhaps thoughts that could be arranged beyond the stream of emotional flow. So, she thought, he will never know. A thought largely free of distress. Most of life consists of not-knowing.

And then finally there came her granddaughter. So late as to be given up for by all as her own daughter had been. And who was the very image of her own mother. As she’d never seen or even guessed that her mother might’ve once been. But was unmistakable in the child. And again she thought I’ve been given something here. Something I never even thought I wanted and nothing that can be shared. For there was no one to share it with and no reason to do so. But still a gift. As if life would not quit but insisted on informing her over and again that whatever form she thought was settled upon was only one quivering instance, true and intact but merely a moment before another truth asserted itself. A blond-haired child with those wide and deep pale blue eyes, lashes so fine as to not exist at all. The past then was not passed and life not a line but a circle, one far wider and deeper than the simple round of birth to death. She loved this child and the child was also a torment to her memory.

And because of all this she recalled that man who allowed torment to eat all but the final hard stone of his soul. She held no regret for his death. But after so many years forgave him for the deaths of the others, his own children. She slept little these late days and often times in the small hours would let herself quiet from the house to go into the gardens under starlight and gaze down at the breadth of lake and allow herself those few tears that remained to her. She was not embarrassed by their scarcity—they were an abundance to her, each one rolling slow
seeping from her eyes was a bound-up fullness of all of her. It was a lovely thing. And at that hour nothing she had to fear explaining to any other person. Tears for the dead. Tears for the long-gone.