On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery (6 page)

Finally Earl snatched Willa’s bait, “Why resist fame?”

Willa settled deeper into her chair and hooked both heels on the rung below before answering. “You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that men do say a great deal about women and sentimentality,” she paused to look him in the eye, “but almost nothing about men and fame?”

“Yes,” Earl drawled it out, stalling while he figured the loopholes and consequences of his admission. Earl might be a gentle man and generous, but he did not like to be wrong.

“Oh,” Willa broke in to concede with a sweep of her arm, “men used to talk about fame a great deal. ‘That last infirmity of a noble mind,’ Milton called it. And before Milton and before the Renaissance, men talked about fame all the time. With great anxiety. Hardly talked about anything else. Considered it part of Pride, the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins. It got in the way of absolutely everything, they said. The farther back you go, the more anxiety you’ll find about it. People refused to sign names to what they did,” Willa brushed one hand against the other as if she were erasing records. “Names weren’t important. Homer got attached to the
Iliad
, but we don’t know who Homer was any more than we know who painted pictographs or the symbols in caves.”

Both men lit up with the reference to visual art. “Well, names are important now,” Earl pointed out. “All you hear about is the artist, not his paintings. One painting often stands for all he’s done.”

“Exactly my point,” Willa laughed. “And in case you haven’t noticed, for all we know, all painters are male. Those we consider important, anyway,” Willa paused. “Now men pursue fame. Fame’s certainly no problem any more. For men, that is. Women who pursue it come off as silly. But men are important, men can be famous. It’s so American,” she finally sighed, “and so wrong headed.”

“American, yes, but wrong headed?” Rudolph challenged.

“Wrong headed, yes. Why carry on so about individuals,” Willa demanded. “And why get the myth of creative genius all mixed up with stories about artists’ personal lives? Or better yet, why let journalists get them all mixed up? It’s what we do that matters, not who we are. Deeds. Actions. Art. Not individuals or personalities.”

Earl cleared his throat. “That sounds pretty old fashioned,” he finally said, “almost old-time religious.”

“Well, old time stays in fashion sometimes,” Edith finally entered the argument. “Milton and Spenser and those other Renaissance fellows did think a certain kind of personality important. But they called it character, the kind Everyman should have. Milton himself said it took a good man to produce great art.”

“Good character, great art, yes,” Willa agreed, “but what I am talking about is older fashioned than Milton. Maybe even pre-church religious,” she paused to grin at Earl. “Just think about it. All this genius talk and personal gossip just puffs men up beyond the limits of sense and human gravity. Enlarged heads are only the beginning,” she chuckled. “Once started, their reputations swell them up altogether and carry them off like the hot air balloons at Coney Island. First they bloat and start to look distended,” Willa puffed up her cheeks and shoved her belly out until it pushed against the table, “and then they preen and dance and swagger through the air.”

Edith giggled again at the image, remembering how Willa rose to whirl about the room like an awkward, pregnant Isadora Duncan. “Readers no longer see writers’ works, only those floating Kewpie doll figures filled with their own hot air,” Willa’s words came slowly, each following a swirl. When she sat back down, her expression turned serious and intense, “How the Great Man as Artist or, for that matter, a Silly Woman Writer can expect readers to achieve empathetic identification with what’s going on in their novels when they refuse to get out of the way of their pages is beyond me,” and she thumped her hand hard upon the table. Willa had been so forceful, so adamant, her whole body so involved in her words, that at that moment the legs collapsed from under her chair.

Earl, springing forward to bring her back to her feet, laughed, “Well, that certainly fell flat, didn’t it?”

But it hadn’t, of course, and now Willa’s collapse served to punctuate Edith’s memory. Edith also remembered Rudolph’s surprise at the questions that followed about why it was all so much worse when the Great Man was female. Edith had guessed that it was because of the different standards people used to judge the personal lives of men and women. Willa had said it amounted to three little words, all of them capitalized, Women Should Not.

Rudolph and Earl had come a long way toward wisdom since then, and Willa claimed that those long nights of talk with Rudolph at the helm were the some of most decisive moments in her career. That’s when, she said, she moved from pretending to be in Bohemia to being there. They also learned a great deal from Earl about painting and religion and, more recently, about meditation. He was already wise enough then to marry Edith’s college roommate, Edith smiled to herself, though why Earl had to cart Achsah off half way around the world, Edith would never fully understand or approve. She wanted them closer. As painters, Earl and Achsah loved the light on Capri, but now Earl was translating the writings of Buddha, and they were talking about moving to India. Achsah’s letters were full of the plan. They expected D. H. Lawrence and Frieda, two of their closest friends, to go along. And they wanted Edith and Willa to join them.

Well, Lawrence might go, Edith refilled her cup, but she knew Willa would desist. Edith replaced the pot and glanced out the window, her eyes settling momentarily on Rob Feeney, whose uniformed back was just then entering the bank. Edith’s inner eye glimpsed the passage of the S. S. Grand Manan as it crossed the mouth of Whale Cove. Feeney was a nice fellow, always teasing Edith about seasickness at the same time he tried to make her passage as comfortable as possible.

When they built the cottage on Grand Manan, Willa declared that twenty miles off the tip of Maine was as far from the United States as she wanted to be for any extended period. And not just because of Edith’s regular bouts of seasickness. They had already tried France. After all, with Earl and Achsah and Jan and Isabelle within a day’s journey of each other and the cost of living so much less abroad, moving to France or Italy seemed sensible. Especially once Willa’s own fame took hold. But after only a few months, they began to feel disconnected. From themselves, not just from the country or the people they knew. Insulation from crowds and hectic schedules, yes, they both needed that. But they also needed immersion. It was important for them and especially for Willa to hear the nuances and feel the pace of their own country. It was a writer’s life blood, Willa finally had determined. Her life blood. Not to experience the language and cadence of America, Willa guessed, meant that she would become a different writer or perhaps no writer at all. That was a price neither of them chose to pay.

But men, Edith realized she had digressed into woolgathering. Nice men. Mean men. Men had nothing to do with their decision. One man in particular, however, might have a great deal to do with Sabra Jane’s ability to make any decisions at all from now on. Surely there was a mistake here.

E
DITH
tried again to see what surrounded the red shirt that had so centrally occupied her mind’s eye. This was like working a motion picture film. Edith tried slowing the reel of her memory to inspect the image with the shirt frame by frame. But her eye fixed the scene in considerably less detail than a camera might have. Or perhaps the problem was focus. She had been too far away to catch the sharp features necessary for distinguishing the sex or identity of the person in the shirt. She was sure it was the person’s back, though she couldn’t say exactly why. The pattern of the movements, she guessed, told her that. The way the arm flung itself out, perhaps that was it. The legs, she recalled, seemed to be spread. Yes, the person wore pants. Black pants, brown pants, blue, she couldn’t tell. But dark, darker than the blaze of red above or the rocks below. Boots, shoes. She couldn’t say. She looked again toward the head. Dark, darker than a face would be, Edith thought. But she caught no hint of color or length of hair. Probably short, she guessed, unless the person was wearing a close hat, something knitted, perhaps. Not likely, the way the day had warmed up.

What was there, Edith wondered, among the things she could remember about this shirted figure to separate it from Sabra Jane Briggs. Sabra Jane wore her hair bobbed and shingled in the back, so that was no help, and its color didn’t matter. The color of the shirt could easily have been the red Sabra Jane wore, and the person seemed to have a waist, the shirt tucked in just as Sabra Jane’s had been. Her jodhpurs had been a mahogany brown that day and her boots the tall lace-ups she customarily wore. Could the person have been wearing those boots? Maybe. Maybe not. All Edith could say for certain was that the legs had been spread, the figure’s final pose like a ballet dancer’s or the flourish of a star who wants the audience to recognize with applause the rest of the cast. Why had the arm flung itself out? Edith had no idea.

“A
ND
then, you know, he never took the time to unpack.” Edith’s thought was interrupted by the jangle of a bell and voices from the next room, where the entrance to Rose Cottage was located. “He just opened one bag and left it there.”

“And left his bird book on the bed,” another voice, this one male, interjected before greeting Mary, the young waitress Edith and Willa so much enjoyed. The voice asked for a table for four. They wanted an early luncheon, it said, because they were planning an afternoon at Hole in the Wall.

Mary appeared, leading two couples into the dining room. They crossed to a table on the wall opposite. The young men were wearing the white pants, sweaters, and canvas shoes of tennis players. The women wore jodhpurs and short boots. The brunette was in the process of removing a smart pork-pie hat. She and the blond settled into chairs their husbands held for them. One of the men smiled in Edith’s direction. Edith looked out the window toward the dock to inspect the fishing boats tied up there. Too many gushers tried to get an introduction to Willa through her. Edith had learned to discourage strangers even when Willa was not present.

“What I don’t understand,” continued the first voice, now attached to the pork-pie hat, “is why they don’t know more about him. At The Swallowtail, I mean. I realize it is too soon to hear anything from the wire the constable sent to St. John, but this what’s-his-name, Mr. Brown, must have written The Swallowtail for reservations. Wouldn’t you think they would have his address? Know where he came from? What he did for a living?”

The woman interrupted herself, reaching across the table to select a Lucky Strike from the opened silver case resting in her husband’s hand. Edith recognized the brand even at this distance. It was Willa’s. Wouldn’t that scandalize Willa’s readers, to know that she smoked cigarettes? So many people still thought women like this one in the pork-pie hat racy and immoral, and those who thought that assumed Willa was just like they were. Well, let them think what they like, Edith smiled and looked away again.

“The people at The Swallowtail certainly seemed to know everything about us,” the woman leaned forward again. Edith heard the woman’s chair creak and her husband strike a match. She noticed the top of his forehead had been pinkened by the sun.

“Not exactly, dear,” the husband finally spoke. “I mean, they didn’t exactly know what business I was in,” he shook the match until the flame went out. “Now, what shall we order,” he turned with raised eyebrows back to their friends. Edith glanced out the window again.

That young man who had helped Roy Sharkey deliver the load of stones for the rock garden was just then swinging from a ladder attached to the dock onto a blue and white fishing boat. It had an engine, Edith noticed. Earlier that spring, one of the fellows in the office next to hers at J. Walter Thompson asked the women’s department whether they thought a woman could handle an Evinrude. The result was an advertisement showing a woman at the tiller in house dress and heels, Edith snorted.

A lobster boat this was, she guessed. The Barbara Ann, it said on the stern. Edith was never sure which boats were which, and now she couldn’t remember the young man’s name. James, that was it. Nice young fellow. Strong, too, and a worker. Edith hadn’t caught his last name. He had said
ma’am
three times. She made a mental note to ask Roy Sharkey when he planned to bring the next load of rocks. If young James had found work on one of the fishing boats, it might be a good while. He could be out at sea for several days, and Roy Sharkey was not known for ambition or hard work. His wagon and time on his hands had made his reputation.

But the immediate concern, Edith reminded herself, was learning more about what happened on Seven Days Work and more, too, about Sabra Jane Briggs. Edith thought she might stop by Constable Daggett’s on her way back to Whale Cove. She could not believe Sabra Jane had been part of that tragic event. Someone else must also have been wearing a red shirt the previous afternoon. Why hadn’t anyone noticed?