On her feet, she lifts a length of the same silk from the back of a chair and says, “Take a look.” She loosely gathers the fabric and sweeps it back and forth, causing it to catch and reflect light as a swaying skirt might. She holds up a delicate tulle, a coil of rouleau, and another of soutache, all of the same luminous gray. The end result of her handiwork will be quietly elegant, refined in a way that will set it apart from the flounced and sequined frocks at the party where the gown will first appear.
“Mrs. Coulson’s third order,” she says. “It’s for a party at the Clifton House. The Chamberlains’ eldest girl is coming out.”
“Are we invited?” Even as the words leave my mouth, I know I should not have asked. The Chamberlains are acquaintances, unfamiliar enough to dodge any obligation others might feel.
She shakes her head and says, “But I’ll have two gowns there: Mrs. Coulson’s, and Mrs. Atwell is wearing one, too.”
“I can pull out basting threads or sew on buttons or run up the seams,” I say, “until I prove myself.”
“You proved yourself with the tea dress. I unpacked your trunk this morning. Such a pretty thing deserves better than the corner of a trunk. You can press it later.” She returns to her knees, smoothes the craft-paper cuff over the silk, and begins to pin it into place. “I won’t let you cut. Not yet. The fabric is too expensive and I haven’t got time for another trip to Toronto. I’ll look after the fitting. You can hand me the pins and chalk, and learn as much as you can.”
So I am to work for the first time in my life. I can almost feel a needle between my fingers, basting together bodice seams, each stitch exactly the same length as the one before. There is serenity in sewing, maybe something like what I found sitting in my window seat.
“But Isabel takes priority,” she says, looking up from the silk.
“She’s sleeping.” At least her cheek was on the pillow and her eyes were lightly shut when I tiptoed from her room. I let her think she had me convinced, even though her breathing had not slowed. She is not the type to be a burden, not now. Not ever.
“How did she seem?” Mother says.
“She didn’t eat much, a biscuit and a few sips of tea.”
Mother lets out a sigh, and it nearly causes me to run down the hallway and gather the crumbs from the windowsill and tell Isabel she must eat them no matter what, but surely it would be better to entice her with something other than the biscuit crumbs. “Are the strawberries by the back fence ready to be picked?” I say.
“I’ve been meaning to check.”
At first blush, Mother’s garden seems as immaculate as always. Intricate blooms of columbine nod in midmorning sun. Coneflowers stand erect, their central cores thrust forward, bristling with seeds. But all except the hardiest spires of foxglove and delphinium lay toppled, stalks collapsed under the weight of their own flowers. Peonies droop, their heavy blooms, unsupported by stakes, decaying on the ground. Beneath the garden’s canopy of foliage, purslane spreads its weedy tendrils. Fronds of yarrow and tapered blades of crabgrass poke through once orderly beds of hosta and cranesbill. Instinctively, my fingers seek the base of a clump of crabgrass and gently ease the roots from the soil. As I reach for another, I see Mother has made a decision. Beauty is superfluous, beyond what we need to live. The weeds fall from my fingertips.
The strawberry crop is meager, half-choked by a tangle of silver-lace vine. As a child, I had been given the task of carefully untwisting the vine from the strawberry bushes. Today the work is tedious, though it had seemed pleasant enough back when a summer morning was only something to fritter away. I pinch off an offending tendril and let it fall to the garden floor, where it will rot in the shade.
Once I have gathered a small bowl of strawberries, I walk past the house into the front yard. Here, too, the gardens are unkempt, although slightly less so than in the back, as if Mother had not given up the pretense of order in the front quite so early on.
When I notice the faint rumble of the Niagara River tumbling through the gorge, I move closer, to the front of our property, and listen to the Whirlpool Rapids far below. I stand with my eyes shut, imagining great waves of surging green crashing and toppling to masses of frothy white. When I open my eyes, the fellow who carried my trunk is passing along River Road, likely returning from his camp at the whirlpool. He tips his cap, and I quickly turn away, embarrassed at the thought of myself a moment earlier, listening to the river.
As I reach for the screen door, I look over my shoulder intending to wave but, too late, see only his back. Three fair-size fish hang from a line slung over his shoulder. His bedroll swings back and forth in time with his gait. When he is far enough away that I can no longer tell his collar from his cap, I see him look back toward Glenview. I wave, and it seems he nods, though I cannot say for sure.
I decide then and there I will supervise Isabel’s convalescence outdoors. She will sit on the veranda, and I will read to her from the collection of books Sister Ignatius piled in my arms. I will speak to Mother about moving the chaise longue to the veranda and bring down a wool blanket from the cedar-lined chest. Isabel will eat strawberries and tomatoes and cucumbers straight from the garden, and sip lemonade. But with Mother’s commitment to sparing food for the troops, had she found time to plant the vegetable patch this year?
At any rate, my vigil will begin tomorrow. The fellow with the river eyes will not pass by again, not today.
4
Coaxing Isabel into the garden has remained a difficult task for the two weeks since my return. Always, the sun is too hot or the air too thick with humidity or the flies too bothersome. This morning, she says the day is too bright. The sun has in fact washed much of the color from the sky, leaving it a cloudless, faded blue, and I will have to squint away the light reflecting from the page as I read. But still I insist we move outdoors. I will not begin reading until we do. And Mother, well aware of Dr. Galveston’s prescription for sunshine, says, “Out with the both of you.” Then she is off to Toronto by steamboat in search of yard goods, leaving me alone with Isabel. Once, a day on our own would have meant frivolity, an adventure plotted by Isabel that I would have anticipated for a week. Would she fluster a hack driver by speaking to him in a language she was making up on the spot? Would she have made arrangements for us to meet up with a couple of the older brothers we had met in the academy parlor?
Instead she slouches on the chaise I dragged out to the veranda and complains when I place a dish of raspberries in her lap. Such has been the case for anything other than her beloved strawberries, and they were finished a week ago. When she finally swallows a berry, I seat myself in the wicker rocking chair and open A Tale of Two Cities.
Yesterday we finished The Hound of the Baskervilles. I loved it, at least until Holmes proved there was no supernatural black hound. I disliked that science trumped superstition in the end, that the common folk with their unfounded beliefs were made to look like fools. “You’ve gone soft in the head, believing in the miraculous,” Isabel said.
“I’ve always believed in miracles.”
“So, same as God, you believe in magic black dogs?”
I slid a hand along the wicker arm of my chair. “Sister Leocrita would call that blasphemy.”
“Since when have you bothered about Sister Leocrita? Wasn’t she the one who told you your bits of hovering tin were nothing more than tired eyes?”
“Make fun of me all you want. I know what I’ve seen.”
She is silent throughout the first two chapters of A Tale of Two Cities, which is usual enough with her tendency to nod off. Hoping another paragraph or two will do the trick, I begin the third:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
If she slept, I could finish the buttonholes Mother left out for me. I glance in her direction. “Go on,” she says.
A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of
those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
“It sounds like Dickens has figured out a thing or two,” she says.
I shrug. The words strike me as grim, nothing it will do Isabel a bit of good to debate.
“All humans are mysteries to one another,” she says. “I’m not so sure.”
“Do you think you know me?” She flicks a fallen leaf from the chaise.
“Yes,” I say. But the lighthearted sister I once knew seems almost entirely gone, replaced by the infuriating girl sitting with me now.
“You don’t.”
“I want to,” I say, closing the book. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Keep reading,” she says.
And I do, though lounging on the veranda has begun to seem indulgent with Mother bent over the sewing machine and the notices in every newspaper discouraging idleness. There are bandages to be rolled, socks and scarves and wristlets to be knit, flannel shirts and pillowcases to be sewn.
A short while later I glimpse a figure approaching on River Road. I raise the book from my knees, so I only have to lift my eyes slightly to keep watch. Once I make out a tall fellow with a bedroll and a flat cap, I stumble through a few more paragraphs, losing my spot on the page several times.
Since my vigil began, it is the second time I have spotted him on River Road. The first time, he tipped his cap when he was just opposite the house and I gingerly lifted my palm to him, all the while continuing to read in a steady voice. Isabel’s eyes remained downcast, on her fingers tracing the velvet piping of the chaise, and I thought I had fooled her.
But just now as I peek over the top of the book, her gaze meets mine. “Go ahead,” she says. “Wave to your drudge.”
I slam the book closed and stand, waving boldly overhead, more so once I remember that Mother has gone to Toronto and that Father left the house in a frock coat, the wrinkled one he was wearing the day before. A while back Mother would have told him he looked unkempt and pressed the coat. She said nothing this morning, and it made me think she does not care to impress the company he keeps. Still, I have seen the thin line her lips become when he appears at the breakfast table only after she has had to call up the stairs a half dozen times. I bet she listens late at night, same as I do, for his key in the lock, for the subsequent stumble up the stairs.
To my dismay and delight, my wave is returned, and he crosses River Road and heads toward the slope leading to the high ground of our property. When he stops at the front walk of a small house along the way, my spirits sink. A squat mistress rises from the vegetable patch and shuffles over to him. She waits there, folding her arms, shaking her head, gesticulating her refusal, until she reaches into the pocket of her apron and exchanges a handful of coins for a fish he unties from his line. As he turns to continue up the slope, Isabel says, “He’s a fishmonger, for God’s sake.”
When he cannot possibly be headed anywhere but Glenview, I walk to the front gate and open it.
“She wanted the pike,” he says, jutting his chin toward the woman below, “but it’s for you.” He holds out a long, spotted fish, and I reach for it, hesitantly. I have never held a fish. “Do you know how to gut it?”
“You could show me,” I say.
Because it seems I should already know his name, I do not ask it and introduce him to Isabel as the fellow who helped Mother and me with the trunk. She says, “Hello,” but does not offer her hand. It is awkwardly silent for a moment, until he says to me, “Where’s the water pump?”
We leave her on the veranda and walk around to the back of the house. He selects a flat piece of wood from the woodpile as we go. At the pump he lays the fish on the wood and says, “First, it needs to be scaled. Hang on to it by the tail.”
I grasp the fish. “Like this?”
He nods and holds out a knife with a bone handle. I take it, my fingertips grazing his knuckles. “The blade needs to snag the free edge of the scales.”
“Tail to head, then?” I say.
“Right.”
My eyes on the pike, I try to make short work of the task. “In dressmaking we call it against the nap.”
From his silence, I take it he has not understood.
“Think of velvet,” I say. “Run a hand over its surface, with the nap and it’s silky smooth, against the nap and it’s less so.”
“Can’t say I’ve had a whole lot of experience with velvet.”
“Well, your fingers would leave a trail,” I say, thinking about the ordinariness of velvet in my life. I clear the scales collected on the knife blade on the edge of the wood.
While I pump, he rinses the fish, his forearms extending beyond his turned-up shirtsleeves. I have always considered myself somewhat squeamish, maybe because I was expected to be. But once he shows me where to insert the knife, I slit open the belly and pull the innards from the fish easily enough. As instructed, I lift the gill covers and pull them away, and cut along each side of the dorsal fin and lift it upward along with the root bones. My cheeks grow hot under his gaze.
“Can you cook?” he says.
Until recently my experience in the kitchen was limited to the pie and bread Bride used to let me help with. But to admit it might give the impression that I am lazy and spoiled, and I am neither, not anymore. “I don’t know about fish.”
“Have you got forcemeat?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Stuff it into the gut and sew the opening closed. I used to smear it with egg and roll it in bread crumbs, but a rye flour paste and then a bit of cornmeal works, too, if you’re conserving.”
“My mother’s got us down to white bread once a week,” I say, though I sometimes wonder if her diligence has just as much to do with necessity as it does with the war.
“We’d better get used to it.” He glances away, shakes his head so solemnly that I know he is thinking of Ypres, Canada’s first and only battle to date. The line had been held, but massive artillery bombardments and a poison the newspapers called chlorine gas meant that in forty-eight hours one in three Canadian soldiers was a casualty. At the outset, not quite a year ago, there had been singing and cheering in the streets, declarations that the war would be over with by Christmastime. Ypres put an end to that.
“Do you like raspberries?” I say.
“Yep.”
In the kitchen I tip a bowl of raspberries over a small brown paper sack and guide the fruit through the opening. I stand at the window a moment, my hips pressed against the wooden lip of the counter, contentedly watching him. He rinses the wood on which the fish was cleaned and then rounds the corner, likely headed toward the woodpile. A moment later I whirl around, startled to hear him call my name from just outside the kitchen door. “Bess,” he says, “have you got a newspaper, for the guts?”
“You know my name.”
“I heard your mother say it.”
“I don’t know yours,” I say, stepping from the kitchen into the backyard.
“Tom,” he says. “Thomas Cole.”
While he scrapes up the innards, I wait idly, holding the berries, mouthing the name Tom, thinking I will not call him Thomas, although the few Thomases I know all go by the more formal name. This Thomas, who sleeps by the whirlpool, and catches fish and thinks enough of me to bring me one, called himself Tom. He rinses his hands clean, and I give him the brown paper sack.
“I could bring you a fish tomorrow?” he says.
Tomorrow Mother will be home and not at all pleased with a fish offered as a gift, even if it means more beef and bacon for the troops. “I can pay you with berries.” I hold out the sack.
“I don’t want to be paid.”
“The cherries are almost ready, and soon there’ll be gooseberries. I could make a pie.”
“I like fishing,” he says. “I catch more than I can ea
t.”
“We’re going to have loads of cherries this year.”
“Suit yourself,” he says, finally taking the berries from me.
No sooner have Isabel and I settled down to reading once again than an automobile turns from River Road onto Buttrey Street. It is not Father, and he drives one of the few automobiles in Silvertown. The neighboring men walk the several blocks between their homes and the International Silver Company, and their wives either shop nearby on Erie Avenue or go by electric trolley to Centre Street, where they can barter in Italian. “Are you expecting someone?” I say.
“It’s the Atwells. I recognize the Runabout.” She rolls her eyes at the mention of the automobile. “They ought to get rid of it. No one drives anything with a tiller anymore.” But the Atwells are not wasteful or showy, and there is the war. “I’d die of embarrassment,” she says.
“Shut up, Isabel.” I am sick of telling myself that Boyce Cruickshank is to blame for her mood, that he is the person I ought to be angry with.
After the Runabout comes to a halt, Kit hops down from the bench seat. “I’m learning to drive,” she says. Edward, her older brother, who failed matriculation at the University of Toronto, despite the best tutors and references, waves a large hand and grins.
They have spent the fortnight since the end of the term at a cousin’s cottage on Stoney Lake. I notice the subtle changes—the lightly bronzed skin, the insect bites on her wrist, the fingernails not quite so chewed to the quick as they were during final exams, the splashes of near white in her flaxen hair—and wonder if she sees how different I am. I badly want to tell her, but what can I say? I have learned to gut a fish and to flawlessly pleat a blouse. I have become adept at ignoring the crumbs left on the windowsill and putting Father from my mind, though, like Isabel, he is utterly changed. No longer does he prattle on about the chemistry of aluminum or the ease with which falling water is made into electricity. There is no talk of a future in which Niagara Falls spearheads Canada’s economy. And gone are the claps on the back, the eyes welled with pride for even the smallest feats: an unremarkable square of needlepoint, a mediocre pie, a middling bit of prose. Instead he is absent, hiding from Mother, Isabel, and me.