The Wednesday Daughters

  —I suppose I’m simply tired, Bea says.

  —Or saying dramatic things just to be dramatic?

  —I’m a tired, old, nearly blind lady who can no longer paint, she says. I suppose the thing about no longer being able to do a thing is that you have to decide it’s no longer worth doing, so the loss doesn’t break your heart.

  —Oh, Bea, I say.

  She stares into the small flame burning on the table beside the tub.

  —Those years of Mr. Harold Warne nearly ruining the business with his forgery spoilt the writing for me.

  —But you told me the other day that you cannot rest, Bea. That you must draw, no matter how poor the result, and when you have a bad time come over you, it is a stronger desire than ever.

  —Did I? Well, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’ll write again. Perhaps I’ll find a new publisher who will appreciate rather than expect. Or perhaps we could do a book together. Your friend Kath might publish us.

  —But you’re dead, Bea, I remind her. I fear it might be tough to market anything we purported to write together, since you died the year I was born.

  —I see, she says. Yes, there is that impediment, isn’t there?

  In the silence, I pick up the photo of Hope and Sammy on my nightstand, Hope with that empty lunch box she was so intent on taking to kindergarten, as if Anna Page herself were sequestered inside her gently used gift.

  —You know what I’ll miss most, Bea, when I’m gone? I ask.

  —What will you miss most, dear Allison?

  —The baths I used to take with Hope when she was a child.

  —But those are a thing of the past already, dear. Your daughter is all grown up. You don’t want to be like my mother, pushing her around in a perambulator—

  —Until she gets out and says she would rather walk, I finish.

  —I’ve told you that before, then.

  —I believe you’ve told me just about everything at this point, Bea. I stare into the flame of the candle on my bedside table, smaller and gentler than the aggressive heat of the coal fire.

  —I wish she would have a child, I say.

  —Water Lily?

  —Hope, Bea. She’s all twisted up about how she’ll be a mother and still have her career, and what her children will be like, and whether Kevin … Kevin can seem so certain about things that he leaves Hope doubting herself.

  —Men often seem certain when women doubt, don’t they? Bea says.

  She runs a hand through the bubbles.

  —Love is only the starting point, of course, she says. It’s the kindnesses that make the difference in a marriage, the everyday kindnesses that make the long days of a relationship work.

  —So Hope keeps putting it off and putting it off.

  —Perhaps she doesn’t want children, Allison.

  —But Kevin does.

  —Does he, Allison? Or is it someone else in your daughter’s life who wants children for her?

  I touch a finger to the candle on my bedside table, the melted wax clinging to my finger smoothing the crevices of my unique fingerprint. Hope and Sammy have been the joy of my life. I can’t imagine their lives would be complete without that joy.

  —My mother couldn’t imagine I could be happy marrying a man who wasn’t “a gentleman,” Bea says. Your mother couldn’t imagine you happily married to an Indian man. Hope is making her own choices. You ought to be proud of her.

  She squeezes the loofah again, the dripping water reminding me of the stream that flowed from the feet of Hope’s poor Mr. Jackson after his bath.

  —That isn’t your fault, Allison, Bea says.

  —About Mr. Jackson?

  —That your parents weren’t proud of you.

  —If I’d managed to say it better, to make them understand—

  —You can’t make people listen, Allison. You can only say a thing as well as you can and hope they will hear. And I do think marrying the man you love is about as nice a way of putting a thing to say as there is, don’t you?

  I suppose she’s right. I suppose I know that.

  —But of course you do, she says. You and I are one and the same, aren’t we?

  The coal fire is settling, finally, into a warm glow behind the tub. Funny that I’d never made a coal fire before I moved here. Heavens to Betsy, did my first effort smoke! I had to open the windows and the door. I do believe that’s why Graham rushes down to start the fire for me when I first arrive. He’s afraid I’ll burn the cottage down.

  —Hope will like Graham when she meets him, I say. They’ll have that in common. The tortured identity.

  —Unlike you. You’ve never felt tortured about your own identity.

  (Offered with a wry smile. Well, I deserve that, having poked her about being dramatic and ignored her pleas for me to write about her infernal sheep.)

  —I liked what Graham said when we were hiking today, I say. When we were talking about being biracial. “The fact that another person suffers more than we do doesn’t make our own suffering less.”

  —“The fact of another’s suffering doesn’t lessen our own,” Bea says, setting me straight about Graham’s exact phrase the way Hope always has set me straight about my Beatrix Potter quotes.

  —He’s Hope’s and Sammy’s Uncle Graham, although I don’t suppose they’ll ever call him that, I say.

  —Their Uncle Graham, Bea repeats.

  She runs a hand through the water, and a hint of vanilla mingles with the warmth of the coal fire.

  —There aren’t any of us Potters left, she says wistfully. My brother, Bertram, didn’t have children, either.

  I move to the end of the bed and reach across to cup a handful of water—still hot. My hand comes up bubble-covered and red from the heat.

  —They aren’t a thing of the past, Bea, I say.

  —What aren’t, Allison?

  —The baths with Hope when she was a girl. They’re there in her face every time I look at it. I know she’s struggling, but I also know she’ll sort it out, because I see that in her eyes. Her eyes are shaded where they used to be bold, but all the little-girl cockiness, all the before-the-world-got-to-her confidence, that’s still there.

  Bea sinks lower in the bubbles, dipping her nose into the vanilla smell that always makes me think of Hope, and she closes her eyes. We’re both so tired.

  —Careful, there. I can’t have you drowning on my watch, I say.

  —You forget, she says, I’m already dead.

  I scoop up a handful of bubbles and set them on her pale white knee, the way I used to set them on Hope’s tiny little perpetually skinned ones, remembering how often I used to misquote Bea’s books to Hope just to see the pride in her face as she set me right.

  —Those baths with Hope are with me every time I sink into this bathtub, I say. Every time I open that funny blue door into this cottage. I think it’s why I love this place so much: because the tub is here in the center of everything, forever reminding me of Hope.

  —Giving you Hope even when she isn’t with you? Bea says.

  I laugh, thinking of Jim as I again test the water, which is slightly cooler. Jim always did love a good pun, or even a bad one.

  —Do you think Hope will ever come here, Bea, after I’m gone?

  I’d like her to. I like to imagine that even after I’m gone, Hope will come here to write, like I have. I like to imagine she’ll fill this tub with bubbles, and her daughter will come looking for her like Hope used to come looking for me, and she’ll pull her knees up in the water and make room for her daughter to join her.

  —Her daughter, should she choose to have children, Bea says, won’t have far to come looking.

  She smiles up at me, a small bubble beard on her chin.

  —Did Hope really have a Mr. Jackson doll when she was a child? she asks.

  —Two of them, I assure her. Mr. Jackson the First never did recover from that bath.

  —I do love the irony of a toad never recovering from a dip in the water, Bea
says.

  —A toad who “lived in a drain below the hedge, in a very dirty wet ditch,” I say. A line Hope was forever correcting me on. Do I have it right even now?

  —Perhaps that was the problem, Bea says. Perhaps it wasn’t the water so much as the clean soapy bubble bath that did Mr. Jackson in!

  I laugh again, the way I used to laugh with Hope and Sammy when we read Bea’s books. I love her gentle sense of humor.

  —All right, old girl, I say, it’s my turn for the tub.

  She asks me to hand her a towel and turn my back, and I indulge her in this.

  —I’m not really dead, you know, Allison, she says to my turned back.

  —Aren’t you, now? I say with amusement.

  I turn again to the slipper tub and the coal fire, the candle burning on the table beside the bottle of vanilla bubble bath, saying she may be right, I suppose she’ll never be dead as long as children read.

  I’m surprised to see not Bea but Hope standing there, a little toddler Hope holding a soggy Mr. Jackson. She giggles and leans over to blow out the candle, like she always did at the end of our baths. I blink, and she is gone as surely as Bea is, really, and I’m left alone with only the candle beside the tub burning gently as the coal bricks in the grate grow riddled and craggy, but remain warm.

  Dear Mr. Warne, … I wonder if you will care for either of these.… I’m afraid you don’t like frogs but it would make pretty pictures with water-forget-me-nots, lilies etc.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, TRANSMITTING THE DRAFT TEXT OF The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, IN A FEBRUARY 2, 1905, LETTER TO NORMAN WARNE

  RAIN POUNDED ON THE COTTAGE ROOF AND THE SLATE PATIO AND THE windows, on the lake you could barely see through the storm. I set a fire and took the last match from the tin box, and lit it, and tossed it right onto a fire starter. “Here we are, Mom,” I said as the flame sprang up. “You and me and the rain.” I turned on the tub water, and when it began running warm, I wedged the rubber stopper on its metal chain into the drain, and I tipped the bottle of bubble bath into the stream of water, watching the blue mingling with the clear and the bubbles foaming. While the tub filled, I sat on the love seat with Mom’s puzzle box, tracing a finger from the inset wood of the baby’s halo over the edge, to the first hidden panel. The mother didn’t have a halo, I realized as I slid the first panel down; only the child had a halo. I was still thinking about that as I took a handful of what was left of my mother, and climbed into the tub.

  At Ainsley’s End that afternoon, I called Kevin from the telephone in the alcove off the front entry.

  “Hope,” he said gently when I remained silent after his hello, trying not to cry. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

  I wanted to climb into his voice and settle there, the way I used to climb into my parents’ laps.

  “You’ve let her go, then?” he murmured.

  I nodded, gathering myself.

  “You’re nodding that way you do when you don’t trust yourself to speak, aren’t you?” he said softly.

  “A little,” I managed, feeling a hint of a smile even through the sadness. “I let a little of her go.”

  “I can’t bear not being there to help you through this,” he said. “I could be on a flight in three hours. I could be there by morning your time. Let me help you through this, Hope, please?”

  The wind outside gushed, rattling the windows.

  “It’s raining,” I said.

  “I don’t mind a little rain.”

  “I had to shed my rain gear in the entryway outside the door,” I said. “I don’t mind a lot of rain.”

  In the silence that followed, I listened to the world outside. Perhaps the rain had stopped. Perhaps it was only the wind I was hearing. Things were so changeable here.

  “She used to let me climb in the bath with her,” I said. “Mom did.”

  “She loved that,” he said.

  “She has a slipper tub in the middle of her cottage here, not in the bathroom but between the fireplace and the bed.”

  Had a slipper tub. I supposed it had become my slipper tub.

  “Does she?” he said gently. “By the fireplace, where she would have been nice and warm.”

  “I took a bath with her,” I confessed.

  I knew from his long silence that he was imagining it: my too thin nakedness sinking into the water, the bubbly wetness mingling with the ash in my hand, the awful paste I hadn’t anticipated. I’d skimmed her along the water’s surface, rubbing what was left of Mom together with the fresh vanilla bubbles. I’d smoothed it all over me, on my face and on my shoulders, on my breasts like the breasts she used to cover with a washcloth, on my knees where she’d piled up bubbles whenever I climbed into the bath with her.

  “I’m glad,” Kevin said. “She would have liked that. Mom would have liked that.”

  In his words, I heard Mom’s voice the day we married, Mom in the snow-softened spring day looking up at Kevin, who had volunteered to her that he would take great care of me. She put both hands on his tuxedoed shoulders, gently laughing as she reached up. “Heavens to Betsy, don’t let her catch you at it!” The words said to Kevin but directed at me. “You’d best let her think she’s doing all the caretaking, Kevin, perhaps with a little help from Anna Page.”

  She’d turned to me and said, “He’s not like Mr. Jackson, Hope. Aunt Frankie can’t make you a replacement Kevin if you drown this one. If his feet are muddy now and then, just accept a little mud into your pantry. You’d grow bored with a man whose feet are always clean.”

  “Kev,” I said, “can I ask you something?” In the long moment I took to gather my courage, I lost it. “The thing about teaching me how to save the sponge,” I said, thinking of the last stupid argument we’d had, about how to wash a pan, “was that a joke?”

  He laughed a little, then said apparently it hadn’t been, he wasn’t always as funny as he meant to be.

  “Jules and Ape both laughed,” I said.

  “Alas, not my intended audience.”

  “What a drip I am sometimes,” I admitted.

  “Pun intended?” He laughed again. “Get it? You were washing a pan, right?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just been so much, with Jamie and Dad and now Mom.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s okay. I know. And don’t worry. The how-to-wash-a-pan lessons can wait.”

  And so it was very late that night—when he called me from the airport in New York to tell me he’d gotten the overnight flight to Manchester—before I asked how he’d known the Beatrix Potter quote. “That first day at the register,” I said. “Anna Page told you to say that, didn’t she?”

  “When we bought your bike?”

  “She slept with her sister’s fiancé.”

  “God, that guy was such a jerk,” he said. “Lacy is lucky Anna Page saved her from him.”

  “But did you?”

  “Did I …?”

  There was such a long stretch of painful quiet over the phone that I was sure he had.

  “You don’t imagine I’ve ever cheated on you, Hope.”

  “But before.”

  “Before we met? Because I knew the Potter quote?” He sighed. “Anna Page told me if I found myself wanting to win your heart, I should take you to buy something and quote the line to you.”

  “She told you to buy me a bicycle?”

  “I think she had in mind a ticket to the football game.”

  “You never read Ginger and Pickles to your fifth-graders? You just remembered the line Anna Page fed you from before we met?”

  “I had her write it on my arm at the tailgate party.”

  In the long silence, I heard a pan being set on the stove in the Ainsley’s End kitchen, Aunt Kath fixing midnight cocoa.

  “Did she show you a photo of me?” I asked. Like she’d shown Isaac the photo of Jamie, except that it had been Julie.

  Kevin laughed his easy General Opie laugh. “Hope, if Anna Page had shown me a
photo of you, I’d have memorized the whole of Ginger and Pickles before the tailgate party. I’d have made sure I could quote every line of it.”

  I ran a finger along the looped cord, the old-fashioned Ainsley’s End phone. Did the rest of it matter? I’d always known Kevin had slept with other women before he met me. Did it matter who they were?

  “I was attracted to Anna Page,” he admitted. “She was attracted to me. I sometimes wonder if that isn’t why she started talking to me about you almost from the moment we met. Because I’m basically a decent guy.”

  Upstairs, a door squeaked on its hinges.

  “Anna Page sleeps with absolute jerks she can abandon, Hope, before they abandon her. Guys like Isaac and me, she gives us away to her friends so we’re out of bounds. So she won’t sleep with us. So we can’t cause her the hurt that she doesn’t seem to realize we never would.”

  I heard, in his words, the truth of them. Or the almost truth. Anna Page wouldn’t have slept with Kevin. She would hurt someone like her father, as he would hurt her even if he didn’t realize he did. But she wouldn’t hurt people who loved like her mother loves. She would put them in the hands of someone who would love them the way they deserved to be loved, a love she believed herself incapable of.

  I am sorry to tell you I have jibbed at the pigeons. I have never been good at birds; and whatever you say—I cannot see them in clothes.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, IN A MARCH 4, 1921, LETTER TO HER THEN PUBLISHER, FRUING WARNE

  MAYBE IT WAS THE CAFFEINE IN THE HOT CHOCOLATE HER MOTHER brought her just after midnight, Anna Page thought as she slipped from her bed at Ainsley’s End for the second night in a row, or maybe it was the fact that Kevin was arriving the next morning that unsettled her. Outside, it wasn’t raining, but she raised her hood against the cold. She circled around through the herb garden, stopping to smell the rosemary, looking without meaning to be caught looking. She wandered along the bare paths by the roses and circled around to the arbor. Graham was in the same spot he’d been the night before, alone on the bench with only his sketch pad and the reading lamp for company. She watched him as she had the prior night, his head bent over the pad, his fingers moving easily over the page.