The Color of Water in July (7 page)

“Good morning, Jess,” Mamie said. “I had a word with Judge Whitmire last evening.”

Jess couldn’t think how to answer, so she said nothing. Just walked over to the bread box to pull out some bread for toast.

Mamie stood up and took a step toward Jess; there was an awkward hesitation in her step, just a slight hitch of indecision. Briskly, she patted Jess twice on the arm, just two brief taps. “Young Phelps won’t be bothering you anymore.”

Jess turned her head and looked away, wishing that Mamie would drop the subject, acknowledging the gesture by just the barest nod of her head.

Mamie walked back to the table and resumed her crossword puzzle, taking a small sip of her Ovaltine from time to time.

Jess sat down at the table next to her, forcing herself to nibble on the toast, which felt like sawdust in her mouth.

After a long period of silence, Mamie looked up at Jess.

“And stay away from that Painter boy! He’s nothing but trouble.”

Jess felt her sore and tired muscles clench. The image of Daniel Painter pulling up her jeans and dragging her off the beach was so burningly painful to contemplate.

She hoped passionately that she would never see him again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

J
ESS
,
AGE THIRTY-THREE

“Jess, what say we do a little Hemingway today?” Russ said as he and Jess sat across from each other at the breakfast table, sipping black coffee and reading a three-day-old
New York Times
.

“Read Hemingway?”

“No,
do
Hemingway. You know, take a little walk in the woods. Commune with nature a little bit? What do people do up here anyway?”

“Sail,” Jess said. “And play golf.”

“Well, we don’t sail . . . ” Russ said. “Do we?”

“No, we don’t sail, Russ.”

“What we need to do is traipse through the woods carrying a musket and looking for Indian signs, you know, like Ernie would have done.”

“Indian signs?” Jess said. “Honestly, Russ, aren’t you going a little too far with the Hemingway thing?”

Russ was unfazed. “Well, I don’t think it would be right to come to Hemingway country and not walk in the woods. Come on, let’s get it over with.”

Reluctantly, Jess agreed. Why shouldn’t she go into the woods? She had come to the cottage. No point in treating the woods like some kind of sacred space. As a child, Jess had thought of the woods as being trackless and indefinably vast. She now understood the geography of the place much better. There was a little pie-shaped area of undeveloped land, cutting between the road and the lakeshore. People said that in the winter, when the trees were bare, you could see right out to the road. It was in those woods that the last of the giant white pine stood. She hadn’t known that as a child, didn’t remember anyone mentioning it. It wasn’t the kind of thing—golf scores, sailing races—that Wequetona people usually talked about.

So she would take a little walk in the woods with Russ. She was sure he would soon tire of looking at trees. Russ went into the bedroom to get ready, and when he came out, Jess bit back a laugh. Out of his usual city garb, he was wearing a neon-yellow Columbia Sportswear jacket and hiking boots that looked like they had been designed to withstand a trek into the Himalayas. In one hand, he held
The Field Guide to the Deciduous Trees of North America
, and in the other, a little combo gizmo that looked like some kind of a compass/flashlight/hunting knife.

Instead of turning left at the front walk that led back toward the other cottages and the beach, they turned right where the walkway shortly turned into the woods and led over a rustic footbridge. It soon became a narrow path, so thickly covered with pine needles that their footsteps made a hollow, thumping sound when they walked.

Just beyond the footbridge, not more than twenty yards into the woods, Jess noticed a sign that she did not recall having seen there before:
L
ITTLE
T
RAVERSE
C
ONSERVANCY.
C
ONSERVATION
L
AND.
N
O HUNTING, FIRES, OR DISTURBING PLANT LIFE.
S
TAY ON CLEARLY MARKED PATHS.

“That’s funny,” Jess said, reading the sign. “Mamie always told me that these woods were part of our property. Her father made his fortune in lumber, but Mamie told me that when the loggers were set to clear-cut through these woods, he bought the land right out from under them and then left it untouched. Supposedly, almost all the hardwoods were gone by then, but this little patch was left because it was farthest away from the mill.”

“An early visionary of conservation?”

“No, not exactly that. What I heard was that the loggers would have set up camp in the woods—Miss Ada, my great-grandmother, didn’t want the camp there, on account of the smell.”

“What smell?”

“The Indian smell.”

“Well, maybe your grandmother donated the land—it’s not a bad write-off, you know.”

“Oh, that’s impossible,” Jess said. “Margaret would have told me. Besides, Mamie wasn’t exactly the nature-preserve type. She hated the woods. Never set foot in them, as far as I know.”

“The whole story about your great-grandfather was probably just made up. Most stories like that are, you know.”

Russ was hitting his stride. He had his Peterson field guide open and was reading from the introduction—reading, with a tone of authority, about single leaves and leaf clusters, leaf scars, and leaf buds. It had seemed a bright day when they had set out, but now Jess suspected that the sky had clouded over. Though she couldn’t really see the sky through the canopy of leaves, it was dark in the woods, and little sunlight seemed to be filtering through. The woods did appear to go on forever, but if she listened carefully, she could hear the low rumble of cars out on the highway. Jess looked over her shoulder and saw that the cottage had already disappeared from sight, even though she knew it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards away.

“The paper birch tree . . . ” Russ was reading to her all about the unusual tree with the white scored bark that gave the North Woods their distinctive look. “The bark was used for canoe making and as a treatment for rheumatism . . . ”

Jess felt relieved that nothing around them looked familiar. She saw trees everywhere, some birch, some beech with the smooth gray-green trunks, a few of last winter’s pale, dry leaves still clinging to the lower branches under the canopy of green. She felt no special resonance here, their quiet footsteps on the forest floor, Russ’s loud voice.
These woods,
she thought,
evoke nothing.

Then, without warning, she realized that they had entered the stand of giant white pine. Around her on all sides, there were tall tree trunks, ruddy brown and covered with rectangular markings. The trunks rose up straight as the masts of schooners and then disappeared above the beech, poplar, and maple leaves. Jess knew that the branches of the giant white pine spread out above them, forming a supercanopy over the other trees.

“Russ,” Jess whispered, her voice hushed. “Look!” she said.

Russ glanced up from the field guide for a moment, and looked around him.

“What is it?” he said in a voice that seemed to Jess to be much too loud. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s the giant white pine—see the dark trunks of the taller trees?”

Russ looked around, and then back down at his book.

“Giant white pine, giant white pine . . . Ah, here it is . . . Nope! There aren’t any around here. Logging. They’ve all been gone since the turn of the century.”

Jess looked at the spot where she remembered once feeling deep reverence. She could hear the echo of a modest, worshipful voice. Jess felt tired then, and she sat down on a sawed-off tree stump, a stump that still bore the traces of hacking and burning left by loggers—poachers, no doubt—almost a hundred years before. She could hear birdsong now. A lone pine warbler, wasn’t it? At first, she felt sure it was a pine warbler . . . but then she felt less sure, and finally decided she did not know. She watched Russ’s yellow jacket bobbing down the path ahead of her, and then she stood up and followed the path out of the wood—to where the sidewalk started up again, flanked on either side by the green of neatly clipped lawns.

Just as they stepped out of the woods, it started to pour. Russ pulled the rip cord tight on his Gore-Tex jacket, smiling the smile of a little boy with a new toy. Jess felt the cold raindrops penetrate her thin T-shirt, and with a shiver started to jog back to the cottage.

The rain did not let up. They returned to the cottage—Jess damp, Russ dry—where Jess lit a fire in the fireplace. The old cottage was shadowy inside. Russ got absorbed again in doing research on cottage architecture, and Jess roamed around the cottage aimlessly, feeling as if she was looking for something but couldn’t quite remember what.

A stack of leather-bound photo albums caught her attention. Mamie had been a meticulous album maker, carefully labeling her photos and aligning them with little black paper corners. Jess looked through the albums, starting with the ones that showed herself as a child, always prim and proper with a white ribbon in her hair. She remembered posing for pictures, always doing Mamie’s bidding: Here is Jess with her dress on, on the way up the walk to dinner. Here is Jess in her first two-piece bathing suit, with the little strawberries that dangled from the bows on the side. When Jess stopped to think about it, Mamie must have bought most of her clothes. Jess had always worn American clothes; she remembered that her clothes used to arrive in boxes from time to time: Florence Eiseman dresses, and patent-leather Mary Janes that had to be buttoned with a little metal hook.

Jess put aside the pictures of herself and looked at the pictures of her mother. There were few pictures of Margaret, and in most she seemed a little out of focus: Here she was on her tricycle. Here she was swinging on the hammock. In this one, she was twirling on the lawn; in another, she was running away and laughing, looking over her shoulder. Jess could just imagine that Mamie would have had little patience for that, could imagine her saying:
Margaret, I won’t take your picture at all if you won’t stand still
. Jess knew Margaret had never minded Mamie very well. She had always wondered how her mother had dared to defy her grandmother.

Most of the pictures showed Mamie’s family in their prime. There were stiff formal portraits of Mamie’s parents. Mrs. Ada Tretheway dressed in heavy brocades that only exaggerated her ample bosom. Mr. Harris Tretheway had a long, thin face and bright, clear eyes—looked more like Lila than Mamie. Even though Mamie’s father died when she was in her teens, Mr. Tretheway had left enough money to keep Mamie throughout her life, even paying Margaret’s way through expensive private schools and colleges. But his death had taken an emotional toll on the family. After he died, his wife took ill, then, a few years later, Mamie’s sister drowned. The family that had once joyously filled the rooms of the large cottage had shrunk down. During all the summers that Jess had spent with Mamie, the cottage had always seemed cavernous and lonely, and Jess imagined that her mother’s childhood must have been much the same.

Jess studied the images of Lila. In a picture with her husband, they appeared the image of 1920s sophistication, both in light-colored golfing clothes; both fair, they looked like pictures she had seen of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Jess studied the picture of the young fair-haired man, his foot resting on the running board of a two-seater roadster. In brown, spidery script on the white border was written the name
Chapin Flagg
. Though Mamie never talked about Lila, Jess had heard her mention Chapin Flagg from time to time when talking to her old friend May Lewis. Jess had always thought it an odd name. She had understood, without really being told, that Chapin Flagg was somehow a bad fellow.
If it hadn’t been for that Chapin Flagg,
Jess had heard her grandmother say more than once. She had no idea what he might have done, or what had ever become of him, but she had understood that it was somehow his fault that Lila had drowned.

There was one picture in particular that really grabbed Jess. It showed the two sisters, Mamie and Lila, wearing woolen bathing suits that came down to their knees, with towels wrapped around their heads and bulky wool fisherman’s sweaters pulled around their shoulders. The caption read:
Mamie and Lila, setting out to swim across Pine Lake
. Mamie looked radiant, her smile wide and full of life, some of her wild curly hair escaping from under the turban, somehow making the photo look more modern, more lifelike. Lila, standing next to her, eerily pale, even in the photo, had a smile on her face too, but a look in her eye, so vacant, so haunted, that she seemed to see herself drowning already, sliding under the blue water.

After that, there were no more pictures of Lila or Mamie. In fact, it was the last photo in that album.

Jess realized that Russ was looking over her shoulder.

“We can use those.”

Jess looked up at him, confused.

“They’ll look good in the pictures. I like that old-album look in this kind of a setting. It helps evoke the twenties thing we’re going for. You can unload them after that if you want.”

For a second, Jess felt stunned. This was her family, her life history. Russ wanted to sell them? Then, she tried to imagine the albums, dusty, taking up space in her tiny apartment. Life with Margaret had taught her to be disciplined about what she saved and what she discarded. “You’re right,” she said, reluctantly closing the album and placing it back on the pile. “I don’t think I’ll keep them. I just don’t have the space.”

“They’ve got some sale value,” Russ said. “You’d be surprised how many people are poking around antique stores shopping for likely-looking ancestors.”