“But you’ll be in the enviable position, five years from now, of having had your babies, and of having a close-knit, ready-made family.”
She forms a snappy reply, but there’s no point in taking out her anger on this kind man who wants only to help.
“The pregnancy and delivery will cost eighty dollars,” he says. “I know it’s more than Tom cost, but I had to raise my prices by five dollars this year.”
“That’s fine,” she says.
Abruptly he says to get dressed, and then he leaves the room. If he had something to tell her about the pregnancy, he would have. She and the baby must be all right.
The waiting room is full of patients.
Beautiful day melds into beautiful day. The beach becomes so crowded that not a single blanket will fit after ten o’clock in the morning. Claire begs for the wading pool as soon as she wakes up. Grace dangles Tom in the tepid water. The icehouse runs low, and there are days at a time when Grace has no refrigeration in the kitchen. She and Rosie begin to shop every day at Gardiner’s so that they can eat what is fresh and not be worried about cold storage. The corn is good. The tomatoes are fleshy. Cantaloupes are as small as softballs, and watermelons enormous. At night Gene and she eat the watermelons outdoors and spit the seeds into the grass.
One evening, after the kids are asleep, Gene says, “Let’s go to bed.”
Grace doesn’t know whether this means that he is tired or that he wants to make love.
She has her answer in the bed, when he faces her, side by side. His penis is hard, and he makes her feel it, but when she lifts her leg and shifts so that he can enter her, his penis softens. Grace, worried because she knows she has to make this work, begins to stroke him, but she must be doing it wrong, because he stops her hand and says, “I’m sorry.”
She says, “Don’t be.”
After they have broken apart, Grace wonders, for the first time, if Gene is somehow just as perplexed as she is. Might he, in his own way, be trying as hard to make sense of the marriage he is in? Grace doesn’t feel a flood of love, however, but rather a sensation of pity. She doesn’t want to pity her husband.
A fine haze is on the horizon when Gene drives Grace and the children to his mother’s house, now officially Gene’s. It’s located four miles to the south of Hunts Beach and sits on a promontory with a view of rocky shore and ocean. Grace has been to her motherin-law’s home only half a dozen times, twice memorably before the wedding when Mrs. Holland was barely able to conceal her distrust of what she called Grace’s “wiles,” the ones that got her pregnant and ensnared her son before he had completed his studies. Grace thought then, and does so now, that Merle couldn’t possibly have believed, during an intelligent moment, that her son shared none of the blame.
The Ford climbs a winding drive to the house, a well-kept Victorian, painted green with white trim that emphasizes the intricate woodwork around the doors and windows and along the wide front porch. Mr. Holland, before he died, owned stocks and bonds, about which Grace knows nothing except that they provided Merle Holland with a comfortable income. Gene takes Tom in his arms, and Grace holds Claire’s hand as they step up onto the porch. Grace turns to take in the sweep of the coastline. Gene fiddles with a set of keys, and they are in.
Her husband’s face tightens as he enters the dark house with its long hallway to the back, its enclosed sitting room to the right, and the turret room to the left. Grace wonders if her husband is sad or horrified. He opens the French doors to the sitting room. Grace wants to open every window. She rolls a fringed shade to let light in, and Gene scowls as if she shouldn’t have done that.
“The view is great,” she says.
“The sun will let in the heat,” Gene announces, as if parroting an oft-repeated statement of Merle’s.
“Do you think the furniture will mind?”
“Don’t touch anything,” Gene says to Claire, but the warning, Grace knows, is for her.
Ignoring him, she raises the shade.
In the scrutiny of the bright sun, the house shows its age. The wallpaper, a maroon pattern, reveals white plaster where it’s peeling. All the woodwork has been stained a dark mahogany. Claire clings to Grace’s leg, but Grace has no need to cling to anyone.
Did the lack of light twist the plant that grew here? Moving quickly, she passes through a dining room with a table no child has ever been allowed to eat at and into the kitchen with its back windows overlooking the garden. The room, painted pale yellow and white, is a haven. Claire, feeling it, runs along the linoleum, and Grace finds her wooden utensils to play with.
“This I like,” Grace says.
Gene, not looking at her, nods, as if his mother were right. The kitchen is the place for the help. Grace doubts Merle ever visited her kitchen because she had Clodagh to cook and clean for her. When Gene visited with the children, it was Clodagh who had cookies for Claire and a perfectly warmed bottle for Tom. Clodagh, to whom Gene has given her last pay packet. What will happen to the woman?
Outside, the gardens are withering from lack of rain. Grace remembers them as glorious, the result of Merle’s expertise and Joe-the-gardener’s efforts.
Gene coaxes them out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor, given over entirely to Mrs. Holland’s bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, and a piano in the turret. Grace marvels at so much space for one woman, a space much larger, she is certain, than her own home. She touches fabric and silver, writing paper and pens. She fingers necklaces hanging from an ornate mirror, a challenge that Gene doesn’t rise to.
He wants me to like it here, she thinks.
He doesn’t announce their future until they are on the third floor, inspecting the guest rooms, all of which share a bathroom with wooden fixtures and a chain pull for the toilet. Gene invites her to glance out a window in the bedroom that used to be his. The view is majestic. “You can see ships traveling from Boston to Portland from here,” he says.
Grace catches Claire by a foot before she crawls beneath a bed.
“So what do you think?” Gene asks.
“Of the house? It’s enormous.”
“About moving here.”
She has known, ever since the second floor, that Gene would ask this, and though she wants to scream an immediate no, she understands she has to tread carefully.
“It’s grand,” she says, “but it’s isolated. I don’t know who the children would play with. They can’t get off the property unless they cross the coast road and only then to rocks and sea. How will they walk to school when the time comes?”
“There’s a bus,” Gene says. “That’s how I got to school.”
“I do love the kitchen, but the house is too much for us. I’d be working day and night.”
“You already work day and night.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, this has to be easier in some ways,” he points out. “More room to store things.”
This seems to Grace a weak argument. What things? “Is it your idea that we would sleep downstairs and the kids would sleep up here?”
“Well, we’d have the baby with us for the first several months.”
“And Tom and Claire upstairs where we couldn’t hear them?”
Gene sniffs. Grace thinks of Rosie. Who would be her neighbor here? “Aren’t the taxes high?”
“There’s no mortgage.”
“We wouldn’t get much for the bungalow,” she says of a house that is heavily mortgaged.
“We wouldn’t need it if we lived here.”
“All our savings would go to taxes and upkeep,” she argues.
“I’ll get a raise soon.”
She sneezes. Then she sneezes again. She apologizes and sneezes a third time.
“It’s dusty up here,” Gene says. “Nothing a good clean won’t help.”
Grace had no idea she could fake a sneeze so well.
“I can’t do it,” she says. She hates the house—the Victorian dark, the fringed lampshades, the heavy mahogany furniture. The weight of the dwelling makes her hungry for air.
“I think this is my decision to make, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”