She took a bit more ash for herself, slipped the fingers of her empty hand through his, and stood beside him. Napoleon nosed his big head in between them but didn’t push them apart.
Julie stepped up to the box, followed by Robbie and Aunt Kath, and Kevin. I took some, too. Not all of her. I would take the rest of her home to Palo Alto for Sammy. The Wednesday Sisters had already arranged for a bench to be put in Eleanor Pardee Park in her honor, not far from where they’d felled all those lovely sycamore trees. When no one was looking, we would sprinkle the rest of Mom around the new tree at the far end of the bench, where she once brought iced tea and said hello to the women who, with her, had become the Wednesday Sisters, mothers of the Wednesday Daughters, and lifelong friends. Sammy could sit there and watch his children play where we used to play. Kevin and I could, too, perhaps. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine a watercolor Labradoodle playing riot grrrl music in the mansion that once stood there, before Sammy and I were born.
Kevin set Mom’s puzzle box on a flat spot on the rocks behind us, underneath the tilted umbrella and on a handkerchief Graham extracted from his pocket, so the wood wouldn’t get too wet. We all stood as close to the edge of the slippery rocks as we thought safe.
I just about lost one of my shoes among the cabbages, Hope, I remembered Mom saying. I was sure the water might reach up and sweep me away.
Ally, I thought. Her name was Ally Tantry. But I called her Mom.
I opened my fist and held my palm up to the wind, which lifted the bit of crushed bone and carried it over the water before setting it gently down in a sprinkle of soft gray that was gone as soon as the water took it in. Even Napoleon watched for a long, quiet moment, as if he understood.
The others let their handfuls go just as a big gust of wind came up, not blowing the ashes back at us so much as washing us all with the mingle of ash and spray from the force.
“Heavens to Betsy!” Anna Page said, and we laughed as we wiped the spray from our faces.
Kevin collected the puzzle box from the ground and came up behind me, and put it in my hands. He wrapped his arms around my waist, as if to warm me, and set his chin on my head. We stood like that, in the mist of the parallel falls rushing toward the same pool. “No more twist,” he said.
Anna Page linked fingers with Aunt Kath, leaving me thinking how often I’d seen her fingers intertwined with my mother’s, and how Anna Page’s hand had seemed to belong in Mom’s more than my own had. Her nails that had always been dirty—she’d been such a wild young girl—were clean and tended, like her father’s would stay even without his hours in the operating room. But her hands were a younger version of her mother’s hands, strong and sure.
My fingers on my mother’s box, my mother’s fingers in my father’s skin. There was twist, still. This personal secret box would soon be empty, but Mom’s stories, her Beatrix Potter book, her journals never would.
A bit of the spray had moistened the ashes inside the box despite our efforts, a little of Mom’s English Lake District catching a ride home with her. I began working through the steps that would close her safely away. When the wooden edges were smooth, the entry hidden, Anna Page asked, “How do you know how to open it?”
I put the box in her hands and placed her index finger on the baby’s head. “You trace from the baby’s halo to the third flower here,” I said, showing her. “Then you slide the flower down. See?”
In the gesture, I remembered my mother’s soft voice saying that some things in life, you just have to know. Someone tells you and you remember it, and you tell it to someone else. Sometimes you tell it directly, and sometimes you tell it through stories. It’s one of the ways we show our love.
Author’s Note
MY INFATUATION WITH BEATRIX POTTER BEGAN NOT LONG AFTER MY son Chris was born, when we received as a gift twenty-three enticing hardcover books—each no bigger than an adult reader’s hand—lined up in their own portable shelf. Bea’s watercolors on those pages are exquisite, but for me, a word person, their greatest charm lies in the simple words strung together to bring funny characters and fantastic worlds alive. As in the best of children’s fiction, Bea’s gentle humor is as appealing to adult readers as it is to younger folk.
Most of Bea’s characters were as new to me as they were to my son: Jeremy Fisher with his mackintosh all in tatters; poor Tom Kitten, who narrowly escapes being the main ingredient of a “kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding”; Mrs. Tittlemouse and her friend Mr. Jackson, who never wipes his feet. Chris (now an economist) learned the meaning of credit from Ginger and Pickles, whose mouse and rabbit customers “come again and again, and buy quantities” despite their fear of the dog and cat store owners—and never do pay their bills. I can’t see those books without Chris and Nick’s little fingers wrapped around their bedtime choices, giggling in anticipation as Jemima Puddle-duck collects sage and onions for “the sandy whiskered gentleman” fox whose idea of having her for dinner is quite different from her own, and hearing their delighted laughter as Jeremy emerges from a trout’s mouth without his galoshes, exclaiming, “What a mercy that was not a pike!”
So it’s telling, I’m sure, that the first thing Mac and I did when facing the empty nest left by our sons heading for college was to fly away to the quiet side of Lake Windermere, in the English Lake District Beatrix Potter called home. From our little cottage there, we could hike to Bea’s Hill Top Farm, now preserved as a museum, as is the seventeenth-century building that was her husband’s office. At the Armitt Museum in Ambleside, you can see more of Bea’s mushroom drawings than you could possibly desire. You can walk the fells she adored, where she grazed her prize-winning sheep.
It does bring a person alive, to walk with your own true love up the path she walked with her late-life husband, to sit beside Moss Eccles Tarn, where they fished and rowed sometimes until it was quite dark. To chat with a child on the grounds of Wray Castle, where Bea roamed the summer of her own childhood when she first began to paint. To see the cement patches in her baseboards where the rats had to be “stopped out.” To study the markings on the paintings she sent off to her publisher, all that careful attention she paid to details like the precise size of the illustrations, the exact color of a puddle duck’s coat. To cross the lake at Ferry Nab, where she crossed to visit her difficult mother. To see the coded pages of her journals, unguarded observations not meant for anyone’s eyes but her own.
Bea wrote more than 200,000 coded journal words—the length of two copies of The Wednesday Daughters and then some. She wrote extensive letters to friends and family. She wrote picture-letters to children that folded up to make their own envelopes, often responding to children’s letters in her characters’ voices and signing their names.
The Bea I hope comes alive even in death on the pages of this novel would not have been possible without the work of Judy Taylor, who collected Bea’s letters in Beatrix Potter’s Letters and Letters to Children from Beatrix Potter, and Leslie Linder, who decoded Bea’s journal, published as The Journal of Beatrix Potter. I came to these books through Taylor’s Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman and Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. Reading these, rereading Bea’s amazing little books, and visiting her world were among the greatest delights in writing this novel. When I first conceived The Wednesday Daughters, I hadn’t imagined Bea would be a character on its pages, but as I came to know her, I couldn’t resist.
Beatrix Potter with Spot
(compliments of The Beatrix Potter Society)
For Mac
my Lake District cottage companion
and in memory of
Aunt Margaret and Father Pat
Acknowledgments
A MILLION THANKS TO …
Mac Clayton, charming Lake District cottage dweller, intrepid fell hiker, ferry rider, and closed-eyed winding-single-track-road passenger. If I’d known how great you’d look in a raincoat these twenty-five years later, I wouldn’t have been so coy about tho
se first five asks.
Chris and Nick, for so many things. Perhaps the loveliest part of writing this book was having the echo of your childhood laughter over Mr. Jackson and Mrs. Tittlemouse, Ginger and Pickles, Jemima, and Mr. Jeremy Fisher to keep me company even as you were off learning from other books. No mom is prouder.
Cord, Yvonne, Tim, and Emma, who lead by example.
Reader extraordinaire and first-paragraph coach Brenda Rickman Vantrease; I’m so glad we share this journey.
My sister-in-law, Ginny Waite, and my mom—with extra thanks for reading; Dad and Pat for their truly amazing support; Father Pat for the doll that morphed into Ally’s puzzle box lid, and for instilling in me a curiosity about the world beyond the borders of my home; and the whole Waite-Clayton gang for showing up and sharing, and everything else.
The Wednesday Gang at Random House/Ballantine: Libby McGuire, Jennifer Hershey, and Kim Hovey (with particular thanks to Kim for fitting a manuscript read into her hectic summer and, well, for being Kim); Caitlin Alexander, who helped me get it started; Kara Cesare, whose enthusiasm in taking it on midstream has been a godsend; and Lisa Barnes (with thanks to Miles for sharing his mom). Robbin Schiff (for the stunning cover), Diane Hobbing (for the gorgeous interior), Gina Centrello, Jane Von Mehren, Susan Corcoran, Theresa Zoro, Sonya Safro, Beth Pearson, Annette Szlachta-McGinn, Sarah Murphy, Hannah Elnan, Quinne Rogers, Ashley Woodfolk, Rachel Wagner, and so many others. The abundant friendship and support you’ve shown me are indispensible to the quality of my writing, the extent of my audience, and my sanity.
Marly, my happily-ever-after agent, and Michael.
The Wednesday Sisters book club, the WOMBA gang and the Division house one, and my poker pals, all of whom enrich my life even as the latter empty my pocketbook. Also the dear friends who keep me in good wine and good cheer but elude easy categorization: John Willison for the “undiagnosed libertarian” comment and Eric Hahn for inspiring it, and Elaine Hahn and Debby Meredith. And Ellen Michelson, for sharing her extraordinary collection of Beatrix Potter books with me.
Cally Affleck, for the groom’s cottage accommodations and for so warmly opening Belle Grange to my curious eye (and our dirty laundry!); Lucy Nicholson of Lucy’s of Ambleside (next time, we’re coming for the cookery school as well as the restaurant); the staff at Bodysgallen Hall in Wales for making our stay in the cottage with the blue door so luxurious; and the folks at One Three Nine in Bath, England, for the utterly charming two days in the top room with the slipper tub at the end of the bed.
Everyone at the Palo Alto libraries, who do so much for me, including pulling from the shelves so many Beatrix Potter sources (some of which are listed separately in my Author’s Note), as well as Healing Hearts by Kathy Magliato, upon which I relied in making Anna Page a heart surgeon, and Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids by Kip Fulbeck. Also Julie DuVall and the other librarians on LibraryThing, welcome sources of library-patron-based humor and online friendship.
So many booksellers who have provided such fabulous support for my writing that I couldn’t possibly list them all even if I knew them, but especially Margie Scott Tucker, Nancy Salmon, and fellow literary refugee Linda McLaughlin Figel, and …
The many Wednesday Sisters readers who suggested this sequel of sorts that I never meant to write. It was such a warm pleasure to rejoin these old friends and their now-grown daughters, and I would never have thought to do it if not for you. I hope the daughters find as comfortable a place in your affections as their mothers did, and as you have found in mine.
BY MEG WAITE CLAYTON
The Wednesday Daughters
The Four Ms. Bradwells
The Wednesday Sisters
The Language of Light
About the Author
MEG WAITE CLAYTON IS THE NATIONALLY BESTSELLING author of The Wednesday Daughters, The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, and The Language of Light. Her essays and stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Runner’s World, and Writer’s Digest and on public radio. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Clayton lives with her family in Palo Alto, California.
Read on for an excerpt from Meg Waite Clayton’s
The Wednesday Sisters
THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS look like the kind of women who might meet at those fancy coffee shops on University—we do look that way—but we’re not one bit fancy, and we’re not sisters, either. We don’t even meet on Wednesdays, although we did at the beginning. We met at the swings at Pardee Park on Wednesday mornings when our children were young. It’s been thirty-five years, though—more than thirty-five!—since we switched from Wednesdays at ten to Sundays at dawn. Sunrise, whatever time the light first crests the horizon that time of year. It suits us, to leave our meeting time up to the tilt of the earth, the track of the world around the sun.
That’s us, there in the photograph. Yes, that’s me—in one of my chubbier phases, though I suppose one of these days I’ll have to face up to the fact that it’s the thinner me that’s the “phase,” not the chubbier one. And going left to right, that’s Linda (her hair loose and combed, but then she brought the camera, she was the only one who knew we’d be taking a photograph). Next to her is Ally, pale as ever, and then Kath. And the one in the white gloves in front—the one in the coffin—that’s Brett.
BRETT’S GLOVES—that’s what brought us together all those years ago. I had Maggie and Davy with me in the park that first morning, a park full to bursting with children running around together as if any new kid could join them just by saying hello, with clusters of mothers who might—just might—be joined with a simple hello as well. It wasn’t my park yet, just a park in a neighborhood where Danny and I might live if we moved to the Bay Area, a neighborhood with tree-lined streets and neat little yards and sidewalks and leaves turning colors just like at home in Chicago, crumples of red and gold and pale brown skittering around at the curbs. I was sitting on a bench, Davy in my lap and a book in my hand, keeping one eye on Maggie on the slide while surreptitiously watching the other mothers when this woman—Brett, though I didn’t know that then—sat down on a bench across the playground from me, wearing white gloves.
No, we are not of the white-glove generation, not really. Yes, I did wear them to Mass when I was a girl, along with a silly doily on my head, but this was 1967—we’re talking miniskirts and tie-dyed shirts and platform shoes. Or maybe not tie-dye and platforms yet—maybe those came later, just before Izod shirts with the collars up—but miniskirts. At any rate, it was definitely not a white-glove time, much less in the park on a Wednesday morning.
What in the world? I thought. Does this girl think she’s Jackie Kennedy? (Thinking “girl,” yes, but back then it had no attitude in it, no “gi-rl.”) And I was wondering if she might go with the ramshackle house beyond the playground—a sagging white clapboard mansion that had been something in its day, you could see that, with its grandly columned entrance, its still magnificent palm tree, its long, flat spread of lawn—when a mother just settling at the far end of my bench said, “She wears them all the time.”
Those were Linda’s very first words to me: “She wears them all the time.”
I don’t as a rule gossip about people I’ve never met with other people I’ve never met, even women like Linda, who, just from the look of her, seemed she’d be nice to know. She was blond and fit and … well, just Linda, even then wearing a red Stanford baseball cap, big white letters across the front and the longest, thickest blond braid sticking out the back—when girls didn’t wear baseball caps either, or concern themselves with being fit rather than just plain thin.
“You were staring,” Linda said. That’s Linda for you. She’s nothing if not frank.
“Oh,” I said, still stuck on that baseball cap of hers, thinking even Gidget never wore a baseball cap, not the Sandra Dee movie version or the Sally Field TV one.
“I don’t mean to criticize,” she said. “Everyone does.”
“Criticiz
e?”
“Stare at her.” Linda shifted slightly, and I saw then that she was pregnant, though just barely. “You’re new to the neighborhood?” she asked.
“No, we …” I adjusted my cat’s-eye glasses, a nervous habit my mom had forever tried to break me of. “My husband and I might be moving here after he finishes school. He has a job offer, and we … They showed us that little house there.” I indicated the house just across Center Drive from the old mansion. “The split-level with the pink shutters?”
“Oh!” Linda said. “I thought it just sold, like, yesterday. I didn’t know you’d moved in!”
“It’s not sold yet. And we haven’t. We won’t move here until the spring.”
“Oh.” She looked a bit confused. “Well, you are going to paint the shutters, aren’t you?”
As I said, Linda is nothing if not frank.
That was the first Wednesday. September 6, 1967.
When I tell people that—that I first came to the Bay Area at the end of that summer, that that’s when the Wednesday Sisters first met—they inevitably get this look in their eyes that says bell-bottoms and flower power, war protests and race riots, LSD. Even to me, it seems a little improbable in retrospect that I never saw a joint back then, never flashed anyone a peace sign. But I had a three-year-old daughter and a baby son already. I had a husband who’d passed the draft age, who would have a Ph.D. and a full-time job within months. I’d already settled into the life I’d been raised to settle into: dependable daughter, good wife, attentive mother. All the Wednesday Sisters had. We spent the Summer of Love changing diapers, going to the grocery store, baking tuna casseroles and knitting sweater vests (yes, sweater vests), and watching Walter Cronkite from the safety of our family rooms. I watched the local news, too, though that was more about following the Cubs; they’d just lost to the Dodgers, ending a three-game winning streak—not much, three games, but then they are the Cubs and were even that year, despite Fergie Jenkins throwing 236 strikeouts and Ron Santo hitting 31 out of the park.