CHAPTER 22
THAT NIGHT THE rain began to fall so thickly and heavily, it seemed as though the bowl of the ocean had risen into the sky and upended itself. It went on for weeks, the deluge pausing only to reveal more vast columns of gray to the west, their winds screaming as they advanced, so that the chickens had to be staked to the ground with a bit of string around one leg to keep them from being blown right off the morro. I diverted the children by reading The Tempest to them, from the Shakespeare the tender had delivered, and together, we loosely adapted it into a piece they could perform at Christmas.
To my surprise, Euphemia abandoned an afternoon’s work to help us fashion the costumes, and these delighted the children more than the story itself. As Ariel, Jane got two lace handkerchiefs tacked to the shoulders of her dress to suggest wings. Every few minutes she would jump into the air to make them flutter. Edward assumed a dignified expression in Oskar’s wedding jacket and didn’t look ridiculous with my muff tied over his chin as a beard. Archie Johnston donated a sheepskin rug for Nicholas to wear as Caliban, and Mr. Crawley’s indigo nightshirt, together with a crown Euphemia constructed from empty tin cans, was his costume as the prince. I had the perfect dress for Mary’s Miranda.
Though I’d not opened our steamer trunk since the day I’d feverishly collected laundry, now I stood it up on its end and parted its halves, allowing the colorful fabric of my former life to spill forward, crushed but still lovely.
“So pretty.” Jane unself-consciously stroked the sleeve of the blue silk I’d worn to the panorama.
“Yes, that’s the one.” I held it up to Mary’s scrawny chest.
“Not really!” Mary covered her mouth with her hand. She looked almost terrified at the thought.
I floated the dress over her head. The garnet buttons met far too easily at the front, and both girls giggled at the bustle, but when I’d loosened Mary’s braids, I could glimpse the woman she would become.
“She’ll trip over the thing,” Euphemia said, shaking her head. As she combed her fingers through the girl’s hair, I saw that her dismissal disguised both pride and sorrow at her daughter’s maturation.
Little Jane insisted on trying the dress, too. She looked absurd, drowning in silk, but Euphemia indulged her, patiently arranging the folds of material around her feet, making her look as if she were standing in a pool of water.
“I’m a mermaid princess!” the little girl announced.
Our Christmas party, Euphemia hinted, would be an occasion worthy of the fine table linen stored in my trunk, unused since it had left Milwaukee. We would gather, we decided, in my parlor, since it was less crowded with furnishings and bric-a-brac than the Crawleys’, and we would need space for the plank table and for the entertainment. From her hoard of provisions, Euphemia produced a bottle of tawny liquor. We would make rum balls and a large rum cake from her mother’s recipes.
Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, the men rode the steam donkey down the morro in the rain, and by early afternoon, they returned with their quarry. Johnston dangled three ducks by the neck; Mr. Crawley had strung two large rockfish together through the gills; and Oskar had his arms around a sweet-smelling pine that he crowded into one corner of our parlor. Although popping corn was among our stores, Euphemia had never taught the children to string it nor to make paper chains out of strips of old catalog pages. I set them to work on these decorations while Euphemia and I erected the table, covering it with two of my mother’s fine white cloths and laying out the full set of lighthouse china. It was a simple spread, without the niceties of compote dishes or pickle forks, but inviting nonetheless. A bottle of wine glowed in the center with a ruby luster.
At the other end of the room, the children and I strewed evidence of a shipwreck, courtesy of their mother’s collection, and arranged some of the larger rocks and specimens, lengths of driftwood, and coils of dried kelp from our own stash to suggest the island. The players hid in the hall, whispering and giggling as the audience took their seats, while Mr. Crawley went around with the rum that remained after our baking.
“Must you pour so much, Henry?” Euphemia was wearing more than one petticoat under her skirt—she couldn’t know that it was a style long out of date—and it made her appear even larger than usual.
She was right that the tumblers were overfull, given the strong nature of the drink. Mr. Crawley was clearly not in the habit of serving liquor.
“Now, Effie,” Archie said placatingly. “It’s only one night a year.”
“Effie” was so incongruous a name for Euphemia Crawley that I didn’t dare to meet Oskar’s eye for fear I would burst out laughing.
The show itself was both charming and tedious, as children’s performances must be, and as I’d hoped, it took the sting out of a Christmas so far from the ones I remembered. We dimmed the lights, and Janie and Nicholas made a fine storm, drumming with spoons on pots and running back and forth with my dark shawl held over their heads to suggest the tossing wind and the waves. Prospero relinquished his magic stoutly, if a bit stiffly. Miranda handled her gown with surprising grace. Ariel sucked on the strings of her long dark hair—though we’d tied it in rags overnight, it wouldn’t hold a curl—while she delivered her song about coral bones and pearl eyes with only a few whispered prompts, and Caliban growled with delightful fierceness. I’d given Nicholas some lines from the famous speech about the sweet noises of the night, and he spoke them with an appropriately wistful air.
When he’d finished, Archie turned to me. “I see I was right about your being a good teacher,” he said disarmingly. “Although,” he added, glancing at his sister, “you chose the wrong one to play the wild thing.”
Euphemia’s face hardened. “You see, Henry?” she said, plucking the bottle of rum from the floor where it had wandered.
“I only gave him a glass, same as everyone,” Mr. Crawley said.
“Why didn’t you include ‘Be not afraid of greatness’?” Oskar murmured.
“Wrong shipwreck play,” Euphemia said with her usual efficiency.
I admit I was as surprised as Oskar that she would know such a thing. I hoped it didn’t show on my face as it did on his.
“One reads,” she said.
The players, luckily, took no notice of their audience’s inattention, but entertained themselves to the finish, and then we all sat down to eat. Euphemia, with uncharacteristic attention to aesthetics, had added to the table a series of short candles whose flames dipped and straightened in the draft that seeped through the windows. This time it was she who took the bottle around, splashing a few dark drops of wine into each of our glasses.
“Now, Effie, don’t deprive us of our Christmas cheer,” Archie coaxed.
Euphemia frowned. “You don’t always wear it well.”
“I’ve been a good boy all year. Haven’t I, Henry? Tell my sister how good I’ve been, now, c’mon.”
“He hasn’t caused any trouble, Euphemia,” Mr. Crawley said. “It’s true.”
“And I’m entertaining,” Archie said. “Look!” He’d hung his spoon from the end of his nose, and it dangled there ludicrously, making the children scream with laughter and begin applying their spoons to their own noses with clattering results.
“Well,” Euphemia acquiesced, tipping the bottle, “I suppose if you must have it, now’s the time.”
She poured a bit more into each of our glasses while Mr. Crawley served the duck with a fairly steady hand and Oskar, Mr. Crawley, and I lavishly praised the meat and its currant glaze, to appease both brother and sister. Soon we were all festive, the men enjoying themselves by loudly reviling Spain as Euphemia and I peeled oranges and cracked walnuts for the children without insisting that they first finish their peas.
There were no curtains in our parlor windows, and happening to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the dripping glass, I was conscious of how we would appear if anyone—a passing angel, perhaps—could see us from the outside. Much like the lighthouse itself, we, gathered in this little room, were a warm and bright spot in a vast space of cold blackness. I scanned the flushed and happy faces of the people I’d come to know this half-year, grateful that I had a part in this family now that I could no longer be with my own.
Oskar must have been feeling much the same, for he raised his glass, which had been refilled a second or perhaps even a third time, since Mr. Crawley had produced a second bottle of wine, seemingly from under the table. “To Christmas!”
Archie raised his own glass with unwarranted energy, and the liquid in it sloshed alarmingly. “We’ve not heard anything about the noble experiment in a great while,” he said with a smack of his lips. “What’s happened to all the electricity around here? Have we lost it?”
Cravenly, I kept my eyes on my plate, wondering how Oskar would respond. Archie Johnston was rude, and I didn’t like to see my husband embarrassed, but I, too, wished for answers to questions somewhat like these.
“Lost it?” Oskar said. “No, it’s just . . .” He shrugged in the defeated way that had become familiar. “Just that I can’t find it, I guess. But it’s here. Electricity can never be lost. It remains even after we die.”
Mr. Crawley nodded as he picked a bit of orange pulp from between his teeth. Euphemia looked as if she were waiting for something mildly unpleasant to cease. But Archie seemed sincerely interested. “Are you talking about the spirit world, then?”
“Not in the sense of table-turning or any of that nonsense,” Oskar said. “That’s been thoroughly debunked. But certainly, electromagnetism is the life force that never dies.”
“So electromagnetism is God?” Euphemia said dryly.
“You mock, Effie, because you don’t understand a man’s need to do something more than trudge around and around like a donkey in harness. It’s all right for you and old Henry here, tending that light like a couple of nursemaids. But some of us want more. Isn’t that right, Oskar?”
“The light saves lives,” Euphemia said calmly. “It’s important work.”
“For women, maybe. Women like that sort of thing, keeping things tidy and on schedule.”
“Well, now!” Mr. Crawley clapped his hands. “Don’t you have a little surprise in the kitchen, Euphemia?”
Euphemia gave her brother a long look, clearly reluctant to give up the argument without having the last word, but she placed both palms on the table and pushed herself dramatically to her feet.
The surprise was a honeycomb she’d been squirreling away, and the children were as excited by the sweet as she’d anticipated. They reached with their butter knives as soon as she’d set it on the table, and Jane, in her excitement, brought her little arm too close to one of the candles. She dropped her knife and howled as if her hand had been sliced clean away.
Instantly, Archie snatched the girl from her chair and pulled her into his lap. The roughness with which he handled her made her wail all the harder, and she reached for her mother. He let her go reluctantly.
“For heaven’s sake,” Euphemia said, disentangling the child’s arm from her neck to study the skin, “it’s only a little burn. Look, it’s hardly pink.”
In fact, it was impossible to tell any color in that dim light.
Euphemia touched her lips to Jane’s inner arm, and the child stopped crying. “Bedtime,” Euphemia said.
“Yes, children,” Archie said, “if your mother says it doesn’t hurt, then there’s no pain, and if she tells you to go to bed, you must drop off immediately. So go to bed. Go to bed!” he roared.
“Now, Archie,” Mr. Crawley began, his voice like thin milk. He put one hand on his brother-in-law’s arm. “Exercise some self-control.”
Euphemia had shooed the children out. We could hear them running up the stairs of their house. She came to stand beside her brother. He looked puny and weak in his chair beneath her great height and beside her wide skirt.
“You’d best see to the light, Archie,” Euphemia said. Her voice was like iron. I, for one, could not have stood up to it.
“She thinks she can boss me,” he said, keeping his eyes on Oskar. “She’s got me stuck up here, keeps my woman in the rocks, rations my liquor.”
I may have emitted an audible sound of surprise when he mentioned the woman. Archie and Euphemia so thoroughly commanded everyone’s attention that no one noticed.
Archie, pretending that he controlled the scene, raised his glass and drained it ostentatiously. He turned his head to look up at Euphemia. “Always in the right, aren’t you?”
She stood silent, unwavering, holding his gaze, a pillar of rectitude.
At last he looked away, almost sheepish. “Oh, yes, the damned light. You’d think it was the star of Bethlehem.” But obediently, he went out.