The Edge of the Earth

  “I’m sure he’s had a hard time of it,” my mother said kindly. “It must be very difficult to follow in Manfred’s footsteps.”

  “You can hardly say he’s done much following. Poor Peter despairs of his ever making a success of himself.”

  Stewing in my own mix of longing, disappointment, and shame, I said nothing about walking on one’s own feet.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  While we were out, a cheap envelope of the sort used to pay the iceman was pushed through the letter slot. It was addressed to me, so Gustina laid it on my bed. It contained my coral necklace, as well as a page torn roughly from one of Oskar’s notebooks.

  Dearest Trudy,

  It is not my right to call you that, but you are my Dearest Trudy. I dare to say it because you have a good and true heart, the best I’ve ever known, and you won’t laugh at my poor self but be sorry to have caused such feelings in me when of course you cannot return them. Believe me when I say I’ve fought against this idiocy—I’ve sat my feelings down and given them a stern talking-to and even licked ’em once or twice until they bled—but they only laugh at me. They know what they want and will not be dissuaded by anyone so trifling as me. And so I’m writing to tell you that I plan to leave for California at once. I would not hurt my cousin nor cause you embarrassment. I will, however, love you always.

  Yours without hope,

  Oskar

  P.S. I’m sorry that I took your necklace. I so desired the thing that had lain against your beautiful skin that I couldn’t help myself. I’m sorry I stole your necklace, but you’ve done far worse. You’ve stolen my heart.

  I was powerfully moved by the idea that he planned to sacrifice himself. (Even while I recognized that his claim of hopelessness was merely proper modesty, for what was the letter itself if not hope?) I was enraptured by the notion of a love so fierce it would not be extinguished. I was nineteen, after all, too newly hatched into womanhood to have grown any protective carapace against the pressure of ardency. I don’t accuse him of guile. I believe he produced these sentiments in the same spirit in which I craved them. That is ever the story of love.

  I needed no more than the passion I saw in this letter to refine the clay he’d presented me into a finely molded figure. I admired his intensity of focus, his determination to do something in the world—qualities I wished for myself but feared I lacked either by virtue of my temperament or because I was not a man. The criticisms I’d heard of him were nothing except the fears of those who had neither dreams nor daring. I saw that he had superior understanding, and with it he saw me as no one else did, as someone different, even—dare I say?—better than others had supposed. I believed that he might make my life into something I couldn’t even picture, because it was so far beyond my experience that I had not the imagination to conjure it.

  And so, as my mother said, I ruined everything.

  CHAPTER 7

  OUR FIRST BREAKFAST at Point Lucia was pilot bread, which turned out to be hard enough to break a tooth on. Dipping it in coffee would have helped, but the beans Mrs. Crawley had given me were green, and even supposing I’d had the stove lit and could figure out which apparatus was meant to be a roaster, I’d not have had them browned, ground, and boiled before noon.

  “I’m afraid it’s not a very good first meal.”

  “Never mind.” Oskar swallowed his down. “You’ll figure it out.” And then he was standing again, pushing his hat onto his head. “Best not be late.”

  I followed him to the door. I didn’t want to call him back; I believed that I’d a duty not to, but I felt a sort of panic rise in my throat and couldn’t help myself. “Oskar!”

  “Yes?”

  “But . . . well . . . what should I do today?”

  “Oh.” He smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find something.” He kissed me cheerfully, stepped into the cold, damp air, and was gone.

  The dawn had just begun to gray the kitchen. I knew the place needed cleaning badly, but it was too dark to attempt it. I turned down the lamp and went back up the stairs, aware with every chilly step that I now lived in a pile of stone, perched at the top of a rock, hanging over the sea. The pulse of the ocean penetrated the windows—or it may have been my heart sounding in my ears—and in time to it, I found myself repeating Mrs. Crawley’s words: “No one comes here. No one comes here.” How different this morning would have been on Tenth Street, I thought as I got back into bed. Gustina would have hulled strawberries at the sink while my mother set the table with the bone plates and the bird’s-eye napkins embroidered with cherries. She would polish the silver forks with the hem of her apron before she laid them on, too. And then she would put her head into the back staircase—“Felix! Was ist los?”—because always he was slower to come down than she thought he ought to be, and I slower still, except that now I wasn’t there at all. It seemed likely that I would never be there again, when I thought of the ships and trains, the many nights in unfamiliar beds, that intervened between that life and this.

  The sheets, when I pressed my face to them, still smelled like home. Through the wall, I could hear Mr. Johnston calling gibberish in his sleep.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Missus! Missus!” The children were clamoring for me. Was I expected to begin their schooling already?

  The sun must have risen, but the sky remained gray. I scrambled from the blankets and hurried downstairs. All four stood at my door, mussed and grubby, as if it were the end of the day rather than the start. The oldest boy had a rucksack strapped on his back.

  They stared at me. “Were you sleeping?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “But it’s half past seven.”

  “Your milk and eggs have been here for ages.”

  “Did you sleep in your clothes?”

  They were all talking at once, and I didn’t know whom to answer or, in any case, what to say.

  “We’re going to the beach!” Jane said finally.

  “We thought you might like to go with us,” Mary added.

  I hesitated. “Maybe we ought to begin your lessons.”

  “Not today!” the younger boy exclaimed with real dismay in his face. I remembered that his name was Nicholas.

  “I suppose that can wait.” I looked back over my shoulder. “But our house is so dirty. I ought to clean it.”

  To this they said nothing for a moment. Then Nicholas said again, boldly, “Not today!”

  They looked at me, waiting to find out whether I would scold him for impudence and shoo them away. “All right, today I’ll come with you. Why not?”

  As a child, I’d cooled myself on many a hot summer’s day by walking between the rows of heavy, wet sheets on the clothesline behind our house. Moving through the fog that hung around the rock felt much the same, though there was no freshly washed scent and no sun at the end to warm and dry us. The closest building, the workshop, was a dark, indistinct form. Possibly, the denser patch of gray beyond that was the barn. The lighthouse itself, farther down the path, was only a suggestion of something more solid than air. I expected the children to lead me to the little steam-driven platform on which Oskar and I had been carried up the morro the previous afternoon, but instead they launched themselves off the northern edge of the rock, directly into the clouds.

  I shrank back. The descent was shockingly steep, although, perhaps mercifully, the extent of the slope beyond the first ten feet was so heavily shrouded that it was impossible to judge. What ground I could see consisted of sharp-edged brown and black rocks, each surface scored and cracked, as if some giant had attempted and failed to sculpt this matter into some graceful form. Hard and brutish as the materials were, however, the effect overall was not ugly. The rocks were covered with vegetation exotic to my eye. Orange and green lichens spread in a bright, haphazard patchwork, and plants in various greens and grays, even a few with flowers, clung defiantly to the cracks.

  I picked my way cautiously, but at every few steps, my feet failed to find a purchase, and
I slid until I could grab enough of the low, brittle plants to stop my fall.

  “Is there a path?” I called into the grayness. “Should I be following a path?”

  “No path.” It was Edward who answered. “Best to zigzag.”

  “Yes, don’t try to go straight down.” That was Mary’s voice.

  “You’ll kill yourself!” shouted Nicholas.

  “Wait for me!” demanded Jane. “Ma says you have to wait for me!”

  There was much sliding and scraping and clattering, and from time to time I spotted Jane’s red sweater, but even that very little girl was moving faster than I was. I placed my feet with no notion of where I was going except down, fearing with every step that the ground might disappear entirely. Then, suddenly, the fog thinned. We’d come through the bottom of the cloud. I could see the children, Edward and Mary, sure-footed, in front; Nicholas, accepting the occasional slide on his bottom as the price of not falling behind; and Jane, who just then lost her footing and began sliding fast, rolling onto her stomach, but otherwise abandoning herself to the force of the slope.

  I nearly screamed and let myself slide as fast as I dared without completely losing control, my feet turned sideways to the mountain. The older children looked up and moved to stop the little one’s fall, but in the end, it wasn’t necessary. A dense shrub caught her, and she lay until I could reach her and pull her onto my lap. I let her cry and dabbed at her scrapes with my sleeve.

  “She’s all right,” I called down, but the others had gone on already.

  I sat for a while, the child snuffling in my skirt, and wondered how we would manage to climb up again. Now that I was sitting still and could raise my eyes from the rough ground, and now that the sound of scraping shoes against the crumbling dirt no longer filled my ears, I became aware of the breaking waves. They were more violent today than yesterday, and they hurled themselves toward the rocks that shattered them into a million droplets. The waters I knew, the Great Lake and the Milwaukee River, were gray and stately, green and sluggish, respectively. This was wild, churning stuff, its turquoise color as extravagant as its movements.

  The three older children had shed their shoes and stockings by the time Jane and I reached the bottom. Mary was tucking her skirt into her bloomers. I admired their unself-consciousness and their ease with the rough surf. They ventured in as the sea gathered itself and then ran, shrieking, from the tongues of cold water, like the quick-legged shore birds, although the birds were silent and serious. I followed the children onto an outcropping of rock and watched them squat over a clear saltwater pool, their shadows frightening crabs, which ducked nimbly under rocks. The bottom of the pool was lined with bright orange and brick-red starfish and even one of brilliant blue; small dark shells, whorled into points, like the budding flowers of an apple tree; tiny volcanoes from which waved frondlike tongues; pale green anemones that curled around the children’s insistent poking fingers; columns of black mussels.

  “Look!” Nicholas cried. With a bit of shell, he was teasing a bright pink blob off a rock. “I’ve never seen one like this!”

  The others crowded around, squinting critically.

  “I have,” Edward boasted.

  “You have not!”

  “I have, too.”

  “Don’t touch it!” I cried.

  They all turned to look at me in astonishment.

  “Why not?” Nicholas asked at last.

  “It might bite or sting. It might be poisonous.”

  “It’s not. See?” Nicholas had loosened the animal’s grip on the rock. He plucked it off and held it up. Without its base to support it, it hung limply between his finger and thumb.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Some sort of slug?”

  “It’s not a slug! It’s a nudibranch!” Nicholas said, affronted. “And we’ve never found one this color before.”

  “Nicholas is right, Edward,” Mary said. “I think we ought to keep it.”

  “What’s a . . . what did you call it?” I asked.

  “A nudibranch,” Mary said.

  “Is that a name you made up?”

  “Of course not!” Edward said indignantly. “It’s in the book.”

  “Some Species of the Pacific Coast,” Mary explained.

  “Mary stole it out of the library!” Jane said gleefully.

  “I didn’t steal it,” Mary said. “I put something else in its place. That’s allowed.”

  “Well, I’m keeping this!” Nicholas took a jar out of the rucksack, filled it with seawater, and dropped the animal inside it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  They splashed about in the water, sometimes scooping other animals into jars, sometimes dropping items straight into the rucksack—a bit of bone, for instance, and several rocks imprinted with ancient shells and bored through by worms. They pointed out dolphins’ fins cutting through the waves and the dark bodies of seals lolling on the rocks.

  It was tempting to pick up bits of sea life and look at them more closely once I saw they were harmless. The water itself seemed to bite my feet, however, as I stepped into the icy pool, reaching for a mother-of-pearl shell and a bright red star. I peeled off my boots and stockings and picked my way over the rocks and sand in my naked feet, no different from the children.

  In an hour or two, we were eating pilot bread, thickly sugared with sand, that Edward had fished out of the bottom of the rucksack for our lunch. Although the air was clear enough immediately around us, a haze obscured everything beyond a hundred yards. One minute I was looking at nothing, and the next a dark shape emerged from the north, striding vigorously. The children followed my gaze.

  “Mama!” Janie cried, jumping up and running toward the woman.

  Indeed, it was Mrs. Crawley.

  “What are you doing down here?” she said when she was near enough for normal conversation. Her voice was sharp, although she allowed Jane to swing her arm playfully.

  I’d thought to ask the same of her, although I certainly wouldn’t have used that tone. “The children were showing me—” I began.

  “They know better than to go down to the beach without permission, Mrs. Swann.”

  “But you never give permission,” Edward complained.

  “That’s because there’s plenty for you to do up top. I doubt any of you have finished your chores. And I’m quite sure,” she added, “that Mrs. Swann has a great deal of work to do around her own house.”

  In a moment, the children had tossed their shoes into the rucksack and were scrambling straight up the forbidding, rocky wall, using both hands and feet; even Edward, dragging the full pack, moved quickly. I struggled awkwardly to pull my stockings over my own sandy feet and to thrust my feet into my shoes while Mrs. Crawley stood over me. Somewhat composed at last, I took a few steps toward the path the children had taken, keenly aware of my constricting corset and heavy skirt.

  “We can take the steam donkey,” Mrs. Crawley said.

  It was a long, silent walk to the platform on the east side of the morro, and soon enough I wished that I’d scrambled after the children. I tried to make conversation, although I was rather breathless from having to keep up a near trot to match Mrs. Crawley’s pace.

  “Did you walk far?” I asked.

  “What do you consider far?”

  Her tone wasn’t friendly, and I faltered in my answer. “Oh, more than a mile, I suppose.”

  “Then yes.”

  “It must be an excellent means of exercise,” I chirped.

  Since we’d begun our walk, she hadn’t turned her face in my direction. Now she stared at me. “I don’t require exercise.”

  Clearly, I’d gone wrong and I tried to explain myself. “It’s so different here from Milwaukee.” There you could take a streetcar to the beach and buy lemonade from a stand with a striped awning.

  “Yes,” she said. “Obviously.”

  “The children showed me so many interesting things,” I pressed on. “They have a wonderful sense of curiosity, you know.
”

  Finally, we reached the steam donkey. She threw a log or two into its boiler and reached out a hand to help me aboard. The car began to move before I had my footing, and her fingers closed around mine as she pulled me toward her to keep me from tipping off the platform.

  “Curiosity,” she said, her voice near my ear so I could hear her over the chugging engine, “isn’t necessarily a virtue here.”

  At the top, she whisked away, and there was nothing left for me but to go into my dark house, where a dirty plate littered with the remains of Oskar’s lunch—more pilot bread—lay on the kitchen table. There was a note beside it, written across a thick sheet of paper torn from my sketchbook.

  Dear Mrs. Swann,

  Will you have dinner with me tonight?

  Your love,

  Mr. Swann

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MONTHS BETWEEN Oskar’s declaration and my becoming Mrs. Swann were riddled with the anger of those whom we’d disappointed with our plans, but this served only to heighten our passion and resolve. Like countless others before us, we believed that we alone understood the dictates of love.

  Though Oskar was perhaps none too delicate when he announced his reason for moving out of the Dettweilers’ house and into a Polish boarding establishment on the south side of town, I admired his courage and purposefulness.

  Less stalwart, I wept at the hurt I caused my childhood friend.

  “It’s only a fancy,” Ernst repeated several times. “I’m sure of it.” He turned his back on me and set his face toward the rain-soaked street outside his parents’ parlor. His fingers worked so ferociously, polishing the lenses of his spectacles, that I feared his handkerchief would fill with broken glass.

  In the end, he clasped me to him, and I briefly yearned to belong in that snug space between his broad chest and pinioning arms, for my sake as well as his, but at last I couldn’t draw breath with my face pressed against the soft wool of his jacket, and I pushed myself free.