A Piece of the World

  I don’t believe her. She is living the life she wants to lead. But I don’t really envy her, either. Even without an infirmity it would be hard to adjust to these narrow streets clotted with buildings and pedestrians and endure incessantly clanging streetcars, blaring horns, squealing brakes, music drifting from doorways, human chatter. The Boston sky, watered down by lamplight, is never completely dark. I miss the thick, star-sprayed blackness of Hathorn Point at night, the soft glow of gaslight, the moments of absolute quiet, the view of our yellow fields and the cove and the sea in the distance, the horizon line beyond.

  RAMONA AND EVEN Harland, bless him, are more than generous, but when it’s time to leave, I am ready to go. The day of our departure is brilliantly sunny. Snow is melting into puddles in the streets. Yellow and purple crocuses in the park have burst overnight through the slush. I’m in my tiny bedroom, tucking my few belongings into my suitcase, when there’s a rap at the door. “It’s Sam. May I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  When he opens the door, I look up. His eyes are sparkling and he has a huge grin on his face. “So are you nearly ready?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well, hurry up then.” I hold up a long skirt and fold it in half. “We don’t want to miss the train.”

  He wavers in the doorway, half in the room and half out, his hand on the knob. “I’m not ready to go back.”

  I look up in surprise. “What?”

  He presses his forehead against the door and sighs. “I’ve been thinking. If I’m going to spend my life in a tiny place in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, I want at least to see something of the world.”

  “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”

  “I think I’m just getting started,” he says.

  I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this. “So—you want to stay on with Ramona and Harland? Have you asked them if they mind?”

  “Actually, Herbert Carle has offered me a position as a mail clerk in his company and a room in their house. So I wouldn’t need to stay here.”

  It dawns on me slowly that he’s been hatching this idea for a while. “Why haven’t you told me about this?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “But what will . . . how will . . .”

  “You’ll be fine,” he says, as if reading my mind. “I’m going to escort you to the station. And then I’ll turn right around and go to work.”

  “Well, what about the farm?”

  “Al and Fred can manage. Anyway, it’ll be good for Fred to step up and help out more—he’s been the baby of the family for too long.”

  I feel stung. “You’ve thought this through.”

  “I have.”

  “Without even consulting me.”

  He squirms in the doorway like a dog being scolded. “I was afraid you wouldn’t approve.”

  “It’s not that I don’t approve. It’s that I . . . I . . .” What is it, exactly? “I suppose it’s that I feel . . .”

  “Abandoned,” he says. It’s as if we both realize it at the same time.

  My eyes fill with tears.

  “Oh, Christina,” he says, coming over and putting a hand on my arm. “I’ve only been thinking of myself. I wasn’t thinking of you at all.”

  “Of course you weren’t,” I say, choking on the words. I know I’m being melodramatic, but I can’t help myself. “Why should you? Why should anyone?” Turning away from him, I reach for a folded handkerchief in my suitcase and weep into it, my shoulders shaking.

  Sam steps back. He’s never seen me like this. “I’m being selfish,” he says. “I’ll come home with you on the train.”

  After a few moments, I take a deep breath and dab my eyes with the handkerchief. Outside the window I hear the clatter of a streetcar, a honking car. I think of Mamey’s wanderlust. Her desire to see the wider world. Her frustration that no one in the family seemed to share her ambitions. Why shouldn’t Sam stay in Boston? He has his entire life ahead of him.

  “No,” I say.

  “No . . . ?”

  “You shouldn’t come home.”

  “But you—”

  “It’s all right,” I tell him. “I want you to stay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod. “Mamey would be proud.”

  “Well, I’m hardly sailing around the world,” he says with a smile. “But perhaps Boston is a start.”

  Sam, as promised, escorts me to the station and puts me on a train. He looks so young and handsome and happy standing on the platform, waving good-bye as the train pulls away.

  As Boston recedes into the distance, the domestic concerns that have receded from my thoughts swim back into focus: How is Mother’s health? Has she been sleeping well? Did she manage the cooking? I think about the dirt I’ll find in the corners of the kitchen, the piles of laundry that no doubt await, the ashes piled up in the range. The mule, the cows, the chickens, the pump behind the house . . . I look out at the horizon—horizontal bands of color, black to blue to russet to orange, a line of gold and then blue again. Heading north is like going back in time. When the train pulls into Thomaston it’s cold and muddy and gray, exactly how Boston looked when I arrived there several weeks ago.

  A FEW MONTHS after I’ve returned, Mother sits me down at the dining room table, a letter in her hand. Papa stands behind her in the doorway. “Sam and Ramona would like for you to go back to Boston to be evaluated. The Carles know a very good doctor who—”

  “Yes, she mentioned it,” I interrupt. Now that I’m home again, back to my familiar routines, Boston seems very far away. The disruption of my chores, the effort of the journey, not to mention the almost certain painfulness of the procedure and the far from certain outcome: It’s hard to imagine why I would put myself through such an ordeal. “I said I’d consider it. But honestly, I don’t think there’s any point.”

  Mother reaches for my wrist and grasps it before I can pull away. She turns it over, revealing raised red strips on my arm. “Look. Just look at what you’ve done to yourself.”

  I’ve started using my elbows, my wrists, my knees to lift heavy pots, balance the teakettle and fill it with water from the pump, lug it to the range. My forearms are striped with burns. Partly for this reason and partly because over the years my arms have become thinner and more sticklike, I hide them as often as I can in voluminous sleeves. I yank my arm away, slide the sleeve down to cover it. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I get along fine, Mother.”

  “If it continues getting worse, you will not be able to walk. Have you thought about that?”

  I busy myself brushing some crumbs on the table into a pile. Of course I’ve thought about it. I think about it every day when I navigate the fourteen-foot-long pantry by using my elbows along the walls.

  “Do you think you’ll get along fine when your legs don’t work at all?” she persists.

  “It’s decided,” Papa says abruptly. We both turn to look at him. “She’s going to Boston, and that’s the end of it.”

  Mother nods, clearly surprised. Papa rarely asserts his opinion with such force. “You heard your father,” she says.

  It seems there’s no use arguing. And who knows, maybe they’re right—maybe something can be done to reverse or at least slow my decline. I pack two equally weighted bags to help me keep my balance, and Al borrows a neighbor’s car to drive me to Portland so I won’t have to change trains by myself. When I reach Boston, Sam and Ramona pick me up in Harland’s brand-new sky-blue Cadillac sedan and drive me to City Hospital on Harrison Avenue in the South End—a stately brick building with giant columns and a turreted dome—where I’m admitted for a week’s “observation.”

  A hen-breasted nurse pushes me in a wheelchair into an elevator, accompanied by Sam and Ramona, and up to a small private room on the eighth floor with an iron bed and a view of the neighboring rooftops. It smells o
f paint thinner.

  “When are visiting hours?” Ramona asks.

  The nurse consults my chart. “No visitors.”

  “No visitors? Why on earth not?” Sam asks.

  “The prescription is rest. Rest and solitude.”

  “That hardly seems necessary,” Ramona says.

  “Doctor’s orders,” the nurse says. “I’ll leave you alone with her for ten minutes. Then you need to let her settle in. You can come back to collect her in a week.” Looking over at me, she lifts her beak. “There’s a hospital gown on the bed for you to wear. The doctors will do their rounds later in the afternoon. Any questions?”

  I shake my head. No questions. Except—“What is that smell?”

  “Ether,” Ramona says. “Horrid. I remember it from when I had my tonsils out.”

  “And overcooked peas,” Sam adds.

  When the nurse leaves, Ramona pulls a book out of the bag she’s carrying and places it on the nightstand. My Ántonia. “I haven’t read it, but apparently it’s all the rage. Country life in Nebraska.” She shrugs. “Not my cup of tea, but if you get bored . . .”

  Looking at the book jacket, gold with bronze lettering, I realize that this must be the third in Cather’s prairie trilogy. I read the other two at Walton’s suggestion. A line from O Pioneers! pops into my mind: “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find . . .”

  “We’ll ask the nurse exactly when you’re being discharged so I can be here to pick you up,” Sam says.

  “I’ll be counting the minutes,” I say.

  “If you finish that book, I can bring more,” Ramona says. “Sherwood Anderson has a collection of stories everybody’s talking about.”

  Once a day a gaggle of doctors, gooselike in their white coats, march into the room and gather around my bed, led by a specialist I come to think of as “Big Bug” because of his eyes, enormous behind oversized spectacles. The doctors instruct me to stand up, wave my arms, and stomp my legs, and then, muttering among themselves, troop back out again. They act as if I don’t have ears, but I hear everything they say. The first few days they speculate that perhaps electricity will help. By day four they decide that electricity would be disastrous. Nobody seems to have the slightest idea what’s wrong with me. On the seventh day, Big Bug releases me into the care of Sam and Ramona with a sanctimonious smile and a prescription.

  “You should go on living as you’ve always done,” he declares, steepling his fingers at me while the other doctors scribble notes on their pads. “Eat nourishing food. Live out of doors as much as you can. A quiet country life will do you more good than any medicine or treatment.”

  “I don’t suppose she needed to travel all the way to Boston to learn that,” Ramona mutters under her breath.

  On the train home I squint out the window at a silver-dollar moon framed in a blue-velvet sky. I’ve done what my parents wanted me to do. They don’t have to fret about a cure we didn’t seek. This disease—whatever it is—will advance as it will. I think about the destructiveness of desire: of wanting something unrealistic, of believing in the possibility of rescue. This stint in Boston only confirms my belief that there is no cure for what ails me. No matter how long I hold a stick with fluttering rags above my head, no trawler in the distance will be coming to my rescue.

  Though I am only twenty-five, I know in my bones that my one chance for a different life has come and gone.

  I pull the now-dog-eared copy of My Ántonia out of my satchel—I’ve read it twice—and leaf through the pages, looking for a line that comes near the end. Ah—here it is: “Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” Maybe so, I think. Maybe my memories of sweeter times are vivid enough, and present enough, to overcome the disappointments that followed. And to sustain me through the rest.

  IF ALVARO HAD been born in a previous generation, he would have been a ship captain like our ancestors. His stoic temperament is ideal for sailing. His passion for the sea—up before dawn in all kinds of weather, out on the ocean as light seeps into the sky—is in his blood. But when Papa’s hands stiffen and gnarl, when Sam shows no sign of returning from Boston and Fred gets a job at a dry goods store in Cushing and moves to an apartment in town, Al is the only one left to run the farm.

  “This farm is in fine shape,” I overhear Papa telling him one spring morning. “I’ve managed to save more than two thousand dollars. The horse team and the equipment are paid off. Now it’s up to you to keep it going.”

  Later that morning Al clips our mare, Tessie, to the runner, guides her down to the shore, and loads up his dory—the boat he goes out in every day. He brings it up to the house, hauls it into the shed attached to the kitchen, and stores it upside down, high in the haymow, with all his fishing gear. Then he dry-docks his sailboat, the Oriole, on the tip of the point of Little Island.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him. “Why put the boats away?”

  “That time is past, Christie.”

  “But maybe someday—”

  “I’d rather not be reminded,” he says.

  Over the next few months, thieves pillage the dry-docked sailboat, stealing the fixtures and lanterns and even pieces of wood, leaving its decimated carcass to rot in the grass. The fish house behind the barn falls into disrepair, the tools inside languishing like relics from a long-ago era: decoys, bait barrels, boat caulking, lobster traps as dry and bare-boned as fossils.

  In the late afternoon, when his chores are done, I sometimes find Al in the shed, fast asleep beneath the dory on a pile of horse blankets. I feel badly for him, but I understand. It’s painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.

  ONE DAY A deliveryman from Rockland shows up with a wheelchair, and from then on Papa is rarely out of it.

  “What do you need that thing for?” I ask him.

  “We should get you one, too,” he says.

  “No, thank you.”

  Papa’s bones ache, he says, when he tries to do just about anything. His arms and legs have thinned and weakened; they’re contorted in a way that’s familiar to me. But he calls his condition arthritis and refuses to believe it has anything to do with mine.

  Both of us are proud, but we wear our pride differently. Mine takes the form of defiance, his of shame. To me, using a wheelchair would mean that I’ve given up, resigned myself to a small existence inside the house. I see it as a cage. Papa sees it as a throne, a way to maintain his fleeting dignity. He finds my behavior—my limping and falling—undignified, shameless, pathetic. He is right: I am shameless. I am willing to risk injury and humiliation to move about as I choose. For better or worse, I think, I am probably more Hathorn than Olauson, carrying in my blood both intractability and a refusal to care what anybody thinks.

  I wonder, not for the first time, if shame and pride are merely two sides of the same coin.

  In a fit of optimism—or perhaps denial—Papa buys a car, a black Ford Runabout, for $472 from Knox County Motor Sales in Rockland. The car, a Model T, is shiny and powerful, and though Papa is proud of it, he is too infirm to drive it. I am too. So Al becomes the family chauffeur, taking Papa and the rest of us where we need to go. He drives to the post office every day, whatever the weather, and picks up the mail for our neighbors along the road, distributing it on his way back. He does errands for Mother in Thomaston and Rockland. The car provides Al a measure of freedom: he starts going out at night now and then, usually to Fales, where a group of men can be counted on for a card game, old Irving Fales making a dime or two barbering in the middle of it.

  During one such evening, Al hears about a treatment in Rockland that supposedly cures arthritis, administered by a Doctor S. J. Pole. The next day he drives Papa into Rockland to find out more. The two of them come back talking animatedly about apples and surgery-free treatments, and at supper we pore over the contract Papa has been give
n to sign. The gist of it is that he will be required to eat many apples. There’s a small orchard behind our house that he planted fifteen years ago; the trees are laden with shiny red and green apples. But these, apparently, are not the right kind. He has to eat a specific variety, one he can only get in Thomaston for five cents apiece.

  I flip through the pages of the contract. “It is fully understood by me that while S. J. Pole believes that he can help and perhaps cure me, he in no way guarantees anything,” it reads. “It is mutually agreed that no money paid by me for his services shall be refunded. I am of lawful age.”

  “Fifty-seven. That’s lawful age, isn’t it?” Papa laughs.

  Mother purses her lips. “Has this worked for other people?”

  “Dr. Pole showed us page after page of testimonials from people he cured,” Al says.

  “Katie,” Papa says intently, putting her hand on Mother’s, “this could be the remedy.”

  She nods slowly but doesn’t say anything more.

  “How much money is it, exactly?” I ask.

  “It’s reasonable,” Papa says.

  “How much?”

  Al looks at me steadily. “Papa hasn’t had hope for a long time.”

  “So what does it cost?”

  “Just because nothing worked for you, Christie . . .”

  “I can’t understand why we have to buy apples when we have a perfectly good orchard full of them.”

  “This doctor is an expert. Papa could be cured. You don’t want that?”

  I once read a story about a man named Ivan Ilych who believes he has lived justly and is outraged to discover that he must suffer a horrible fate, an early death of unknown cause. My father is like this. He is furious that he has become a cripple. He has always believed that industry and cleanliness equal moral rectitude, and that moral rectitude should be rewarded. So I’m not surprised that he is so eager to believe this preposterous story about a cure.

  Papa signs the contract and pays for thirty sessions over thirty weeks, the minimum required. Every Tuesday Al helps him into the passenger seat of the Model T and drives to Rockland. At each appointment—which, as far as I can tell, consists merely of paying more money for mysterious tablets and cataloging his intake of those expensive apples—a divot is punched in his contract.