The Edge of the Earth

  I let Oskar show himself around our house. The noises he made as he galloped through the place, opening the cupboards and windows to peer in and out, were similar to the children’s banging.

  “Jesus! What’s this mess?” he shouted down.

  “It belongs to the children. I . . . they’ll . . . we’ll get rid of it.”

  “Looks like they dragged half the beach up there,” he said, seating himself beside me at last.

  “Their mother has a collection, too. It’s awful! Some poor sailor’s teeth!”

  He’d put his hand in my lap and was beginning to stroke my thigh, but I stopped his fingers and held his hand firmly between my own. “Up here, I feel so . . . exposed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone can hear us. Mr. Johnston. Listen.” The cough came again from the apartment next door. “The Crawleys. God.”

  “Oh, God!” He laughed. “I’m not worried about Him. But I agree that Mrs. Crawley is a different matter. She’s daunting, isn’t she? And the way she enlisted you to teach her children. I wouldn’t like to cross her.”

  “You were on her side! Telling her what a wonderful teacher I would be!”

  “You would!”

  “I suppose I must try.”

  “Well, what else are you to do?”

  “There’s a good deal of work about this place,” I mimicked, “and no Chinese servant to do it.”

  But he was right. Who was I here? Not Trudy Schroeder, pampered daughter, lively friend, bright student, all but affianced to steady Ernst Dettweiler. Here I would be a disappointment because I didn’t know how to make butter.

  “Will you like your work?” I asked.

  “It’ll be easy enough.” He imitated Mr. Crawley’s slightly nasal tones. “Scrape the rust, clean the lenses, keep the rollers and the air compressor running at the proper speed. Paint and polish. Check the boiler. Reset the pendulum every six hours, so the foghorn sounds on schedule. It’s only maintaining machinery,” he concluded. “I could do it in my sleep.”

  “If you don’t like it, maybe we could go back. Maybe not to Milwaukee, but to Chicago or Cincinnati. Somewhere not at the edge of the earth.”

  “Go back? No! This place is exactly as I’d hoped it would be.” He rose from the sofa and began to range about as he spoke, testing the slide of the windows, studying the pattern of the wallpaper. “I’ll be able to do some real work here. When we go back, it’ll be in triumph.”

  “Work on your electric engine, you mean?”

  Oskar was among those who thought that electricity might be an efficient alternative to steam power. He’d built a small electric engine in Milwaukee and attached it to a canoe, which attracted a good deal of attention on the river. The problem, as he’d explained it to me, was how to make such a machine large enough to move a craft as heavy as a ship. When we’d learned that we’d be going to a lighthouse, he’d hoped it would provide a useful place for experiments in this line, but halfway here he’d stopped talking about such plans. I was pleased to hear them revived, although to me such work seemed impracticable in this setting. It was far more isolated than we’d imagined.

  “You know, I don’t believe that interests me anymore,” he said. “So many others are already beavering away at electric engines. I’m going to do something new here. Something no one else has got hold of yet.”

  “That’s wonderful, Oskar. What is it?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure yet, but something will present itself. For a curious person, the world is full of opportunities.” He threw open the large parlor window with a bang and leaned out of it, drawing the air loudly into his lungs. “Don’t you think this place is inspiring?”

  “No,” I admitted, wrapping my shawl tightly around my shoulders. The temperature seemed to have dropped twenty degrees since the afternoon. “It frightens me. I don’t think people are meant to be here.”

  “What’s to be afraid of?”

  “Everything! The wind that’s trying to blow us off, the rocks that are waiting to spear us! If we were to step off this mountain one night, how would anyone even know what had happened to us? Being here, it’s like we’ve disappeared.”

  At last, he turned and focused his disconcertingly bright blue eyes on me. “But don’t you see? It’s not we who’ve disappeared. It’s they. We’ve got rid of all those people who would tell us what to do, who to be. Except,” he added slyly, “for Mrs. Crawley. Now, if she were to step off this mountain . . .”

  “Oskar!” But he’d made me laugh, and I was grateful for it.

  “And now, Mrs. Swann,” he said, extending his hand, “if it would please you to accompany me to our own bed in our own house, we’ll do whatever we like.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It may have been our own bed in our own house, but when I awoke later in the night, it was nevertheless an unfamiliar place, full of unfamiliar shadows and, aside from the sheets that smelled comfortingly of home, strange odors. Oskar had opened the bedroom window, and in the dark, the ocean seemed to rise to me. I could smell it, its greenish, half-growing, half-decaying scent laced with salt and an unwashed animal stink. Or perhaps the smell was coming from the children’s collection. I got up and closed the door to the second bedroom and our door and the window as well.

  Except for the bed, our room was empty, so different from the fullness of my parents’ house. I thought of the vanity in my mother’s room at home—no, not at home, this was home now—where she’d brushed my hair not so very long ago and eons ago in preparation for my wedding. I thought of the silver-backed brush and mirror engraved with the swooping initials of the mother my own mother had left behind in Hamburg, a set surrendered to a dusty pawnshop in San Francisco.

  I sniffed. The smell had been coming not from the open window nor from the next room but from Oskar. The sea had marked him with its briny green odor and its underlying scent of rot.

  CHAPTER 5

  IT HAD BEEN only a casual comment at an everyday meal, a small thing, that had caused my life to change course. But any sailor knows that an alteration of a few degrees, uncorrected, is enough to put a ship on a wildly different trajectory.

  The meal that night had also been fish, carp boiled in wine, a dish recently popular with the members of the Milwaukee Women’s Club. It had been prepared with more care than the ling cod.

  “You see, girls,” my mother said, measuring herbs she’d dried the previous summer and dropping them into the pot of simmering, sweet-smelling liquid, “you must pay as much attention to the poaching broth as you do to the sauce.”

  Gustina, our hired girl, nodded, but my attention had wandered to the window where the sky was alive with snow. It was two weeks before Christmas, 1897.

  “All right, Trudy,” my mother said, misinterpreting my distraction. “I know you have your essay to finish. And I’ve got letters to answer. Gustina can watch over this. Don’t forget the potatoes,” she called over her shoulder as she accompanied me to the parlor.

  From my little writing table some portion of an hour later, I watched the lamplighter mount his ladder beside the post outside. There! Thick snow appeared in the sudden circle of light when his pole touched the wick. With the tip of my pen, I pulled spider legs of ink from the rich black blot that had dripped onto my copybook page just after Napoleon had set off for Moscow. I sighed. So far to go. Two more rays, and the spider became a sun. I tapped the pen with my index finger, and a miniature storm of dark droplets splattered the little general.

  “Trudy,” my mother said reproachfullly. She was seated at her own desk, covering pages with an irritating ease. “Don’t make it so hard, liebchen. It’s only a composition.” She rose with a rustle of apricot silk. “I need to check on Gustina.” On her way out of the room, she laid her hand on my shoulder. “You will finish before supper, yes?”

  I sat up, sighed again, and pushed my fingers deep into my hair. Pins sprang from my coif, and I enjoyed the bit of drama and the little mess they made on
her Turkish carpet. “Yes, yes, I’ll try.” I was too uncertain of myself and the source of my malaise to make any sort of stand; the best I could do was bend over the page in an exaggerated attitude of application. She deftly collected the pins without comment, gathered my hair, and twisted it neatly, resettling it like a sweet roll on top of my head.

  When I could no longer hear the whisper of silk, I rose and went to her desk and slipped the unfinished letter from under the blotter. It was to her sister in Hamburg.

  Trudy has lost her passion for her studies. It’s not that she doesn’t know her history and philosophy. The way she argues Kant with Felix! Papa would be pleased. They go until the candles gutter and the cloth is covered in nutshells. It’s like living among chattering squirrels. But when she must compose her thoughts on paper, the rattle of the coals in the stove, the pattern of the snowflakes dropping from the ashen sky, even such little nothings distract her. There, she frowns at me, offended by my own prodigious pen scratchings.

  She practices her music but without conviction. To be sure, her talent is not so great as your Johann’s—I don’t expect ever to hear her études at the Pabst—but she used to play with profound expression. I would wish music to be a greater pleasure to her. What makes my heart weep most, however, is her poor, neglected drawing. Remember those droll cartoons? Pages of them! But she doesn’t prize her skill and hurries through the exercises her master sets for her. All slapdash, as they say here. Such a waste!

  Latin and Greek she claims are useless. Her translations come back covered in red. She proceeds tolerably with mathematics and biology but complains that they, too, can have no place in her life. She taunts me. How have I put to use my knowledge of chemistry, my studies with Professor Von Rhein? “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “You have instructed the laundress not to put too much bleach in the bedsheets and told Gustina to add more vinegar to the kartoffelsalat. That is what you’ve done with your fine education.”

  Be thankful you have only sons, Lilian. You cannot expect them to be like you. But a daughter, naturally so similar to her mother, can be a reproach in every way she is different. Of course, my liebchen is sorry when she is cruel. She throws her arms around my neck and cries. I know her hardness is only a fleeting expression of her own frustration; to absorb it is part of a mother’s role.

  The poor thing is infected with the notion that all of her education is “bourgeois trappings,” as she puts it. “I must create my own destiny!” she insists. How foolish children are to believe themselves wise!

  And now here she is, lying along her arm on the desk like a little girl. To have them little again, just for an hour or two now and then, what wouldn’t we give for it? I must wind her up to finish this composition or she will be wretched.

  In so many ways, this assessment stung, though I couldn’t deny the truth of it. I had been hateful to her. Still, I couldn’t agree that my frustration was a childish emotion I’d outgrow. For three years, I’d been exhilarated by the classes Milwaukee College had offered me. The history, the science, the philosophy, all went far past what I’d learned in high school. Here, I’d believed, were complex but satisfying ways of making sense of events and nature and ideas. I’d felt I was being given a glimpse of the world beyond me and the tools I’d need to explore it further. But now that commencement approached, I’d begun to perceive graduation more as a finish than as a beginning. I’d ingested all the material I’d been fed, but I was a goose plumped for others’ consumption. My parents, Ernst, President McAdams, Miss Dodson, and even Lucy seemed to have a definite vision of how my life should proceed.

  “But the goose will not have it!” I said aloud. And sighed. The trouble was that the goose, being a goose, had no idea what she would have.

  Still, failing history would hardly help me. In any case, I’d been brought up to finish what I’d started. I sat myself straight in my chair again, resolved to push Napoleon smartly on.

  I was fully engrossed in my essay at last when the bell rang. Absently, I capped my pen, wiped my inky fingers, and thinking of the troops pursuing the elusive Russian army and drawn inexorably toward Moscow, I wandered into the hallway and opened the door.

  “Ernst!”

  He had a cheerful, open face, neat white teeth, apple cheeks above his pale brown mustache, and gold-rimmed spectacles that fogged the moment he stepped into the warm house.

  “You’re surprised?” he asked, pulling off his gloves and pushing them into his pocket. He removed his glasses and handed them to me, and I polished them in a wifely manner while he slipped off his coat.

  “Yes . . . I mean, no, of course not. Come in, Ernst. Here, let me take your coat and hat.” I had forgotten that my father had invited Ernst to supper, but no matter.

  My mother hurried from the kitchen, shedding her apron onto a hall chair as she came. She glanced critically at me. “I’ll entertain Ernst while you run upstairs and make yourself presentable.”

  “Oh, Mother, Ernst doesn’t mind a little ink.”

  “No, I like to see the evidence of Trudy’s work. Especially here.” He touched the tip of my nose with a blunt index finger. “It’s very becoming. Like the nose of a little woodland animal.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll wash my face.”

  I ran up the stairs on my toes, eschewing the banister, conscious that I was making my mother sigh by not planting my whole foot on each step as she’d taught me.

  As always in the winter, my room was icy, the porcelain doorknob a cold stone in my palm. Unless someone was ill, there was no cause to light the stoves upstairs. Once inside that private space, I was snagged almost immediately by a sort of inarticulated dream and drifted to the window. The light of the newly risen moon reflected faintly off the whitened yard below. A wooden bench and a patch of red currant bushes in the summertime were amorphous mounds now; the former might be a man reclining under a blanket, the latter a flock of quiet sheep. Even the iron supports for the clothesline were softened by a thick sheath of clinging snow. I clouded the pane with my breath and traced a meandering path with my fingertip.

  Ernst’s laughter boomed up the stairs, recalling me to my purpose. “Say,” he announced when I came back into the parlor, “I noticed that Winn and Hewitt is selling some Sociables. I’d consider buying one if I could be sure of a partner. It’s not good for your health, you know, to read so long and neglect physical exercise.”

  “Sociables?”

  “You know, Mama,” I explained, “those bicycles that let you ride side by side, two people on the same machine. We saw one at Green Lake last summer.”

  “Bicycles in the middle of winter?” my mother said. Distracted, she pulled back the edge of a drapery to look out the window. “What I can’t understand,” she said, “is why anyone should work only eight hours a day when your father works far more than that. Always he is late. If the fish is dry tonight, you will know whom to blame, Ernst.”

  Just then the heavy outer door closed with a thump.

  “Ah!” My mother nearly sprang for the door. “There he is.”

  Ernst and I followed her into the hall, where she was tutting and brushing snow from my father’s collar. “You are a snowman,” she fussed affectionately.

  “And you”—he kissed her lightly on the forehead—“are a hot cross bun.”

  My father was a large man, tall and broad, with cheeks leathered from Lake Michigan’s winds. He’d worked his way up from mechanic in a shipyard to captain of a tug barge to owner of his own barge, which he continued most days to captain himself. He pulled off his fur-lined gloves and flexed his fingers.

  “Your fingers are hurting you again, Papa?”

  “It’s nothing. Only the cold.”

  “You must allow Gerhart to do more of the work, Felix,” my mother scolded. “For what are you paying him?”

  “Ach! You girls! Always fussing!” He winked at Ernst. “You see what you are in for, Ernst, don’t you? And double the trouble if you have a daughter. Did y
ou say the supper was ready, my dear?” He put an arm around the waist of each of his “girls” and led the way down the hall to the dining room.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “So, I hear you have a new carpenter,” my father said, bending over his plate but raising his eyes to Ernst.

  “Yes, my cousin Oskar.”

  “Little O!”

  Oskar had stayed with the Dettweilers years before. I’d gathered at the time, eavesdropping from behind the blue velvet drapes, that because a red flower had died, his mother found herself unable to look at him without weeping. Afraid of being banished myself, I vowed to be more careful around my own mother’s tulip beds. Oskar was a year or two older than Ernst, but a shorter and slighter boy with long girlish curls. He boasted a great deal about his father, who, he said, knew all there was to know about trains and kept beside his desk a big knife from Mexico for stabbing “like that!”—he’d thrust his arm suddenly forward like a fencer scoring a touch—“anyone who bothered him.” He also bragged about his older brother, who had skipped several grades in school. He refused to be amused by any of our games, declaring them “too childish,” but cried to Ernst’s mother when we hid the flannel duck with which he slept. I’m ashamed to admit that we’d meant to make him cry, because when he did, he said, “Oh, oh, oh!” which was odd and amusing and therefore to be provoked. During the scolding we endured afterward, I discovered that the flower had been a younger sister who succumbed to scarlet fever.

  “He isn’t little any longer, but yes, that’s the one. From Cincinnati. You’ll like him now, Trudy. He’s like you, always with his nose in a book.”

  “He’s working as a carpenter?” My mother was quick to spot the seams where the pattern didn’t quite match up.

  Ernst understood her meaning. He shrugged. “He left college, you know. He says he wants to follow his own path, although it’s a dead end, as far as I can see.”