On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery (10 page)

“Momma can be a cross to bear,” Mary Virginia’s face expressed a certain surprise. She had never before said a word of criticism about her mother.

“Mothers are, sometimes,” Willa nodded and reached down to help her niece up. “Like a thorn that never lets loose.”

E
DITH
glanced over to see what progress Willa was making in her search for the trail. Amidst all that laughter, she realized, had been a hint of Willa’s early turmoil with her own mother and a glimpse of the gargoyle-like character Willa was just then creating in her new manuscript about daughters. She called the character Blinker.

Family, Edith smiled to herself. Mary Virginia still had so much growing to do. Edith remembered her own coming to consciousness and the difficult struggle to define her own footing. Willa’s passage had been similar. But independence, they finally realized together, did not have to mean eternal defiance or standing alone or stepping out of one’s place in the human family. Memory held, if nothing else did. And all that youthful stomping and strutting about to assert one’s place in the world, Edith snorted out loud. That was the chimera.

Ties that bind, and ties that set free. Edith finished tying her shoestrings and resettled herself on the fallen log, then glanced again at Willa, now on her knees checking something in the grass Edith could not see.

The focus of Willa’s manuscript had a great deal to do with their current circumstances. Edith’s mother and Willa’s father died within three months of each other just the previous year. Now Willa’s mother lay paralyzed by a stroke in Pasadena, where she had gone to visit Douglass. Edith’s father was also in California, under the care of Edith’s younger sister.

Life seemed suddenly fragile. Neither Willa nor Edith needed Mr. Brown’s final dive to remind them of that. But family ties held fast even past death. The more one strained against them, Edith guessed, the tighter they held. Tentacles, they felt at times, tendrils at others, as capable of choking life out as of bringing it in. The trick, Edith guessed, smiling at Willa, who continued to pat the ground around her knees, lay in staying easy in their grip. And, Edith supposed, in remembering that blood lines were not the only things fastening one to life and to each other.

“E
YES
like those,” Rob Feeney pushed away from his desk for the second time that afternoon, “don’t belong on Grand Manan.”

“What?” Jason Dobbs, the young man the shipping company had placed under Rob for training, looked up from his desk.

Rob realized he had spoken aloud. “That man Brown,” he said now, “he didn’t really belong on Grand Manan.”

“Brown?”

“Yes,” Rob rose to pull a paper cup from the dispenser on the wall behind his desk and fill it with water from the cooler. “He had the look of a man who knew death,” Rob swung back to his desk, the cup in his hand, “knew it and didn’t mind it.”

Jason put down his pen and frowned.

“Oh, never mind me,” Rob settled in his chair, grinning at the confusion on the young man’s face. “I’m just thinking out loud. I saw him, you know, on the passage over.”

“Oh, right,” Jason turned back to his work. He had learned some time ago that Rob Feeney occasionally talked to himself and that when he did, he didn’t really want to engage in conversation. He was just turning things over. Personal things. Memories of his father. A tough guy, Jason had heard, who died at sea. Memories of the war. Jason didn’t much know what to do about those and didn’t want to know. His own life took all his energy.

“L
OOK
what I found,” Willa rose and came back through a cut in the trees, one hand extended, palm up and cupped. Edith slid off the log and trotted over to see.

It was a button. The right size for a shirt and a crimson so rich, it was almost burnt carmine.

“It would go well on a red shirt,” Edith held the button for a moment in her fingers. “Where did you find it?”

The button had been lying by itself just a few feet beyond where the trail once again became obvious, then split immediately to encircle a thicket. The two paths seemed equally well traveled. The button had been on the path to the right, lying just off to the side, cushioned by decaying leaves. Willa prodded the area with a stick while Edith slipped the button into her pocket. She stood for a moment working it like a worry bead, letting her fingers sense what they could from its shape, size, solidity, and smoothness, before letting it drop into the safe confines of her pocket.

Tell me about your owner, Edith’s fingers pressed the question. The button grew warm but remained silent.

“A
FTER
Willa discovered the button, we searched hard all the way back to Whistle Road,” Edith assured Winifred Bromhall later that evening, “but the button was all we found.”

“And what do you think of Miss Briggs? Is she a likely suspect, as everyone seems to think?”

Winifred was picking the scallions out of her salad and placing them on the edge of her plate. Winifred can do anything she wants and be beautiful doing it, the thought flitted across Edith’s mind.

“Certainly not,” Willa’s answer was unusually brusque.

“But what if Miss Briggs had known this Mr. Brown from the city? What if he threatened her somehow … her livelihood, you know … with blackmail or something.”

“Rubbish. Nonsense,” Willa refused to speculate.

Edith watched the knife and fork separate a scallion from the red fluted edge of a lettuce leaf. They worked like miniature pinchers in Winifred’s relaxed grip. What must it be like to live on the inside of such elegance, Willa said just the other day. Willa was right, Edith smiled at Winifred. But then, Willa was usually right. And she didn’t like to gossip.

“Where exactly did you come out?” Margaret Byington’s soft alto interrupted Edith’s reflection.

“Come out?” Edith turned to look at Margaret, who was in the process of settling into the fourth chair at their table. A sturdy, direct woman with dry wit and wonderfully deep laughter, Margaret always made Edith feel somehow warm and pleasureful.

“Just this side of the old logging road into Ashburton Head. You know the place,” Willa at least had been paying attention.

“On Whistle Road,” Edith smiled. “You’re late,” she observed, passing the mashed potatoes.

Margaret nodded, “We got lost on the way to Indian Beach. Too many trees downed by storms blocking the trail. Confused us. It took forever to get there and another forever to get back.”

Ethelwyn Manning, Margaret’s partner in the misadventure, glanced over from a neighboring table where she also had filled a fourth chair. “You should have heard Margaret trying to bargain a fisherman into rowing us home. She tried everything to avoid climbing the steep grade to Eel Lake.”

“I had no money with me,” Margaret laughed, reaching for the haddock, “and he had never heard of credit. Said it must be an American thing.”

“Too bad so many Americans have heard of it,” Willa pronounced. “Just last week
The New York Times
ran an enormous list of bankruptcies. And they are constantly publishing advertisements for liquidation auctions. Why, there was even one recently for exclusive lots around a golf course in Rye,” she shook her head. “No money for farms, no money for land, no money for homes. But for stocks,” she shrugged, “that’s another story.”

“From what I hear, too many people play the stock market on borrowed dollars,” Margaret’s eyes grew momentarily serious.

“Gambling, you mean,” Winifred’s British midlands accent was engagingly droll.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Margaret agreed, helping herself to the haddock, “trying to win what there’s no way to earn.”

“It takes money to make money, they say,” Edith cleared a space in the center of the table for the haddock.

“Middle-class greed, I say,” Margaret pressed on. “That’s what happens when robber barons become heroes, and everyone tries to become part of America’s new royalty. Let’s join the Mellons, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts,” Margaret beat time with her fork as if she were the drum major at the head of a marching band. “And now there’s H.T. Parson,” her fork went even higher, “a man from whom we’ve not heard before.
The Times
says Mr. H. T. began life as bookkeeper, rose to take over the crown at Woolworths, and is now planning to build himself a million-dollar mansion in Paris,” her fork plunged for a new note, then rose again in crescendo, “as soon as he finishes erecting his first million-dollar mansion in Long Branch, New Jersey.” Her fork rose again with “All-American boy makes good, builds many mansions,” and made its final flourish with, “Castles in the Air, compliments of Horatio Alger.”

Edith and Winifred laughed. Willa shook her head.

“You are right, though,” Margaret lowered her fork to fill it with potatoes, “it does take money to make money.” Having conceded Edith’s point, she went on to make her own, “It would just be a whole lot better for everyone if investment dollars weren’t robbed in the first place from the working class. Hardly anyone makes a living wage anymore.”

“It would also be better if they were not borrowed by the middle class,” Edith frowned, “especially to be put into the stock market.”

“Now there’s a silent thief for you. And you do it to yourself,” Willa nodded. “I’m in favor of old-fashioned robbers myself. Let’s hear it for Robin Hood the Good, a man who robbed only the rich,” she grinned.

“Here, here,” Margaret seconded her motion.

W
ILLA
enjoyed Margaret as much as she did, Edith guessed. A forceful woman with a new perspective and a first-rate mind. Until this year, Margaret had been too busy working for the Red Cross to take summers off, but now she had taken a job teaching at Columbia, and her summers were free. Ethelwyn Manning and her great friend, Katherine Schwartz, were old friends of Margaret’s, going back to 1908 when Manning and Margaret both spent a year in Pittsburgh. Manning, just graduated from Smith, was in training at the Carnegie Institute to be a librarian. Margaret, several years beyond Wellesley with a masters in sociology, was in Pittsburgh doing research on the devastating effects of factory policies in the neighboring mill town of Homestead. Margaret’s study turned out to be a milestone, the first of its kind to focus on working-class women and to count their unsalaried labor—taking in washing and putting up boarders—as part of the general economy.

Willa, who had been ambivalent about Pittsburgh the ten years she lived there, was as fascinated by Margaret’s findings as Margaret was by Willa’s experience. Willa had lived on both sides of Pittsburgh’s economic divide, putting up in boarding houses during her early years as a newspaper reporter and then, while she tried her hand at teaching English and Latin at Allegheny High School, luxuriating in the comfortable surroundings of the wealthy McClungs. As a permanent guest in the McClungs’ solid home on Squirrel Hill, Willa had found a second family and a place to write. Long after Willa left Pittsburgh, until 1916, in fact, when the Judge died and Isabelle decided after all to marry Jan Hambourg and sell the family home, Willa returned annually for long visits, partly at first to write and then, once she and Edith had settled into their Bank Street apartment, to keep up with old friends.

But no one in Pittsburgh, least of all Willa Cather, was ever far from the steel mills, even on Squirrel Hill. Especially on Squirrel Hill, Willa once declared, and proceeded to point out that Isabelle’s brother may have married the girl next door, but her name was Mellon, and Isabelle’s father had acquired his reputation as a result of the strike at Homestead. When Judge McClung sentenced Alexander Berkman for attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, their neighbors began calling the Judge the man who saved Pittsburgh—and the world—from anarchism. But how safe was a world, Willa would add, where power and poverty colored men’s minds the way the flames from mill furnaces burnished their nights and ashes darkened their days. Willa probably never would write about class wars and western Pennsylvania, not directly, not in a novel, Edith guessed, but they both loved listening to Margaret talk about the households of Homestead. Lately, Edith had noticed a renewed attention to domestic detail and occasional touches from Margaret’s stories slipping into the background of Willa’s new novel.

Willa always depicted the power of the feminine principle at work in the universe, though Edith realized most of Willa’s readers would be shocked to find that out. And these days, feminine had to do with women’s appearance. Period. People did not realize what Willa was up to. Men certainly didn’t. Men read Willa’s books because she wrote about interesting men. And Willa encouraged them, Edith almost chuckled out loud. Recently, in fact, Willa seemed to be ignoring women altogether, but that was deceptive, just like the emphasis on religion in
Death Comes for the Archbishop.
People thought Willa was Roman Catholic after that. Fiction. Pure fiction.

Anyone who really knew literature or myth or history or art would recognize that the Virgin Mary was the main force in that novel, and behind the Virgin, the feminine principle. But these days, it seemed, the only people who knew literature and art were the artists themselves. And a few scholars, Edith granted, all of whom were men. With a few exceptions—Edith glanced at Margaret, deep in the midst of explaining economic theory to Winifred Bromhall—but the exceptions were mostly in professional schools. Social work, librarianship, education. Women’s professions. Those women couldn’t be expected to analyze fiction, but Willa’s novels spoke to them, whether or not they ever heard of the feminine principle. Men posed a different problem. Men only read about men, and Willa wanted them to read her novels, to take seriously what she had to say. Ever since the War, when men had destroyed so much— all in the name of making the world safe—Willa had increasingly focused on men and their moods. She wanted their attention.

We’ve got it all wrong, Edith knew Willa wanted to shout but couldn’t. No one wanted to listen to a woman rant, Edith reminded her. But they would listen to reason. They would listen if Willa spoke in ways that made it seem as if truth did the talking. Then Willa could declare that the world was not safe or simple, that good was not always good and bad not entirely evil, that humans and life were complex. Let the men in her novels say that, and men would listen. Women, too. Women listened when the women in Willa’s novels declared romantic love a mistake. Now women and men needed to hear the rest of Willa’s message, that maybe we have been hasty with our dreams. Power, progress, competition, conquest, wealth … the values we’ve held, the way we’ve defined success, the men and women we’ve learned to admire. Maybe we have been hasty, we Americans.