The Englishman

chapter 7

“DON’T LET HER BOTHER YOU. She’s never been easy. Well, it’s not been easy for her, and that’s my fault, of course.”

All I said was that Jules came round to introduce herself to me. That was all it took for Karen Walsh to launch into a flood of apologies for her eldest daughter. It is Sunday afternoon, and Pop, Howie, and Grandma Shirley have driven off to see Shirley’s brother and his wife in the next big town beyond Shaftsboro, leaving Karen and the girls to hold the fort. I’ve done all my prep for next week, and I am too nervous to concentrate on any of my other projects. Anyway, why did I move into the country if I’m not going to befriend my neighbors?

Karen seemed happy to see me and offered to set aside the huge box of peas she is shelling, but I reassured her I didn’t mind at all and offered to help. She declined my offer as politely as it was given, and so I have a glass of cold tea in front of me and watch with considerable fascination how she twists the peas out of their pods with two flicks of her wrist.

“She didn’t bother me at all,” I reply diplomatically. “It’s just that I hadn’t…I hadn’t expected her.”

“No…she’s away a lot. Out.” Karen can probably shell peas in her sleep with one hand tied behind her back, but now she has her eyes trained on the green bowl in front of her. “She earns her monthly allowance picking, so she hangs out a lot with the students and the backpackers, and…well, I don’t like it, but there isn’t much I can do about it. I hope that when she’s old enough to drive, she’ll get a job in town, but of course my husband and my father-in-law want her to help on the farm.”

“She mentioned that she’d been to stay with her Dad.”

Karen glances up at me, and at first I take it to be a warning to back off, but it is in fact an expression of relief.

“Yes. I was married before, briefly. I was too young, and—well, she was an accident.”

I try to picture this wiry, self-effacing woman, with her lean, capable hands, when she was eighteen or nineteen. Pregnant, under pressure to marry, or maybe not even under pressure, maybe happy, and eager to have a family and a home.

Light-years away from my own experience.

“Why are you worried about her?”

The busy fingers stop and sink onto the wax tablecloth.

“Well—” But what she means is not, Well, let me think, but Well, how long have you got?

“I mean, she’s a teenager,” I rush on. “She has to give you attitude.”

She smiles, but it is an unconvincing effort.

“I was a student at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,” she says. “I wanted to go into landscape contracting. Julianne’s father and I met as interns working at the state zoo. I was pregnant six weeks after we met, married two months later, and divorced after less than two years. Didn’t finish my degree, broke with my parents. I was working at the food market in town when Howie and I met. You can imagine that his parents were not pleased when he brought me home.”

“I don’t know. Degree or no degree, you must know a lot more about farming than other women Howie might have dated.” I’m still busy assimilating this new and unexpected information.

“Oh, yes, my father-in-law couldn’t hear enough about those fancy new ideas that people taught at college.” I didn’t think Karen Walsh capable of such withering sarcasm. But then I clearly underestimated her all round. “You’re right, she’s at a difficult age,” she agrees, changing the subject, “and nobody knows what she would be like if she wasn’t—you know. The odd one out. Don’t let her adopt you.”

“Adopt me?” I laugh, secretly relieved that Karen has identified what I suspect might become a problem.

“She has this thing about New York City. Of course she’s never been to a place larger than Shaftsboro, except once on a school trip to D.C. It’s all windmills. But if she makes a nuisance of herself, just tell me—oh, that’s the car. Listen, you’re welcome to stay for dinner, Anna.”

We look at each other for a moment and, I think, understand each other tolerably well. So I return to my desk for an hour, then change into a clean blouse and join a very polite Walsh family at the long wooden table in the garden, between the apple trees that are hanging heavy with fruit. There is fried chicken, which I have to decline, rosemary potatoes, pea mash, buttermilk biscuits, tomato and bean salad, and warm blueberry pie. I have more carbohydrates on my plate than Irene eats in a week.

“Are you happy with that, ma’am?” Pop Walsh nods skeptically at my food.

“I am, sir, thank you.” I’m not sure whether he is mocking me with the courtesy title, but I’m not taking any chances. Karen calls me Anna now, and so does Jules, who turns up late, and whose air of defiance I decode as worry that I may have squealed on her. I haven’t, but I’m still annoyed about the sticky puddle of cola on my porch, so I don’t reassure her with the smile she clearly hopes to catch from me. Instead, I stroke the dogs, of which there are two, Olive Oyl, the black giant schnauzer I met when I first came, and a chocolate-colored pointer called Jeanie, who is only moderately interested in me. Olive is still very much the exuberant puppy, with her paws on my thigh to see what I am about. I would indulge her, but the moment Pop spots her, he firmly orders her away from me.

“I don’t mind,” I assure him.

“But I do. We don’t spoil our dogs.”

I change tack, turning to Howie. “So tell me what I’m eating.”

He looks at me with that mixture of alarm and lack of comprehension typical of people addressed in a foreign language. He resembles his soft-featured mother more than his handsome father, but he is not an unattractive man. He is, however, a very quiet man. So far, I have exchanged precisely one word with him (“Hello.” “Hello…”), and I figure if I can’t get him to talk about tomatoes, I can’t get him to talk, period.

“Black cherries,” he says, poking at the contents of his bowl. “And Aunt Ruby’s, the green ones. Aunt Ruby’s German Greens. They’re both heirlooms.”

“Heirlooms? Sounds as if you should wear them round your neck. You know, like hippy beads.”

The twins stare at me, open-mouthed, and Jules gives me an appreciative grin.

“Far out,” she says. “For Goths. Black tomato necklace. You’d have juice dripping out, like blood…gory!”

“Julianne!” her mother reproves her, but without much emphasis. She is more concerned to rescue her husband. “‘Heirloom’ means it’s an old variety, a sort people used to grow in the old days, or that grew in the wild and were later cultivated. Not the sort produced by industrial farming.”

“So you produce both industrial and…um, heirloom vegetables? Is that why there’s an ‘organic’ sign at the top of the road?”

“It’s my hobby,” Karen says a little hastily, as if she was already taking up too much time talking about herself.

“Fruit,” Pop Walsh says. “Tomatoes are fruit.” He says it kindly, like an expert explains the basics of his discipline to a freshman, while he opens a bottle of beer and pours it for his son.

“It’s something to do with the seeds, isn’t it? If it has seeds, it’s a fruit?” I sound a little too eager to demonstrate my knowledge.

Pop looks straight down at the bottle opener in his hand, and I could swear he is amused, but his face hasn’t changed at all. “I never asked you whether you’d like a beer, ma’am,” he says. “It’s made locally in a small brewery.”

Is that another dig? Yankee tourist exploring the indigenous culture.

“Is it nice?” I ask, a little too politely.

He shrugs and reaches for my empty water glass and pours it half full, as if I am a child that is not yet allowed an adult-size portion. It almost makes me laugh. I wouldn’t want to be in Howie’s shoes for the world, or in Grandma Shirley’s, for that matter. On the other hand, I bet Shirley had a good time in bed with him. Maybe still has.

“It is nice,” I report after two sips. “Tangy.”

He gives Jules a quick nod and she trots off, meekly enough, to bring another bottle from the kitchen.

“Karen, will you share?” I ask her. “I’m worried if I have a whole bottle, I’ll be pleasantly plastered tonight, but useless in the morning.”

“Oh, I—” She exchanges an uneasy glance with Howie, who looks down at his plate. “No, thanks, I better not.”

Grandma Shirley looks up from her piece of chicken with a sudden alertness that clashes with her usual, quiet demeanor, and even Pop sits up in his chair as if he had heard the sound of the cavalry in the distance.

“I might as well tell you, too, Anna—I’m…expecting. It’s early days yet, so…I have to be careful. No alcohol, no coffee. No coffee is worse, to tell you the truth.” She giggles a little, but to me it sounds nervous rather than delighted. Not everyone is cheered by the good news. The twins seem oblivious, but Jules is chewing her food as if it had been sitting on the counter for a week and begun to smell. I am very careful not to catch her eye, precisely because my instinct is to side with her.

Pop lifts his glass.

“God is good. If he wills it—here’s to Howard Walsh III!”

My smile is as broad as anyone’s, and I drink before I realize that this was not a joke. Pop Walsh is casting Karen’s undeveloped fetus as the—apparently long-awaited—Calderbrook tomato princeling. In an urgent undertone Shirley asks Karen for details, while Pop and Howie sort out some farm business; I suspect that both the women and the men are channeling the same anxieties. I feel so much like an outsider that I take refuge in starting a conversation with Jules about her driving instruction. It is as if my affinity with the teenage girl struggling to leave home was stronger than my affinity with the adults who have made theirs. I have no home yet, nor am I sure how I would know if I had.

Home is where the heart is.

Well, in that case my home is my desk.

One of the twins—I can’t tell them apart at all; they are both fair and pudgy—kept a beady eye on me while her grandfather was saying grace, and when the hubbub about the new baby has calmed down, she looks over.

“Doctor…will you come to church with us next Sunday?”

She is old enough to know that this is a charged question, but it is not a rhetorical one.

“I’m afraid not, no.”

She gets a nudge from her sister, whose face is a study in curiosity and mischief.

“Do you go to another church? Are you a Catholic?”

“Dolly…” Karen makes a half-hearted attempt.

Since deflection fails, I go for the full frontal.

“No, I’m not a Christian at all. I’m Jewish.”

This information shuts them up for about half a minute.

“What, like—in the Bible, like the Jews who—” Dolly blushes up to the roots of her wheaten hair at what she doesn’t have the courage to say.

“The Lord Jesus was a Jew.” Pop Walsh speaks, and no prophet addressing the Children of Israel ever had as shtum an audience. “And so were his mother Mary, and Joseph, and all the disciples.”

“But—”

A glance from those steely eyes quells Dolly as effectively as it would have quelled me, but Grandma Shirley seems to rate the twins’ spiritual enlightenment higher than the adults’ embarrassment.

“Howard, if they have questions about the Bible, I think they should be allowed to ask.”

He considers his wife’s mild but firm intervention.

“Well—what’s your question, Dolly?”

The twins have been feverishly exchanging views under their breaths and Dolly rises to the occasion.

“If Jesus and Joseph and Mary were Jews, why are we Christians?”

Go on, Solomon, I think grimly. Do your shtick.

“You should know the answer to that one,” he replies without hesitation. “You know that your Grandma’s father brought his family to this part of the world from the west of Germany?”

They nod.

“My great-grandfather came from County Antrim in Ireland. So why are we Americans, even though our families used to be German, in Grandma’s case, and Irish and Scottish, in my case?”

While the girls are trying to negotiate this masterly bluff, I wait to see whether the blue eyes will glance over at me. They do, and I have to grin. Well done, Pop.

“Lieberman is a German name?” Grandma Shirley makes her statement sound like a question.

“Well, sort of. My father’s family came from Warsaw, about a century ago.”

“Ah, so that was…before…”

“Yes, in nineteen oh-six. But my grandmother’s family escaped from Hamburg in thirty-five.”

“Why did she have to escape?” Jenny has picked up the shift in the atmosphere and it makes her uncomfortable. Her question releases a chorus of sighs in the room, and Jules roughly elbows her in the ribs.

“Dumbass!” she hisses under her breath. “Hitler!”

“Oww! Who is Hettler? Dad, Jules hit me!”

In a concerted effort, Karen and Shirley start planning their trip to Georgia, where they are going to spend Thanksgiving week with Howie’s sister and her family. The girls quietly spoon their blueberry pie and occasionally glance up with a mixture of speculation and rancor that has, I think, much to do with my withholding the story of my adventurous grandmother, who made a dare-devil escape from Germany pursued by a villain called Hettler.

“I hope you didn’t hate it!” Karen whispers urgently when she sees me off an hour later amidst a flood of apologies. Of course I didn’t. What’s to hate? The food was delicious, the Walshes were civil, if not exactly friendly to me, and I found them fascinating to watch. My heart is at peace as I walk from the main house toward my cottage, which is a dark shape against the gray backdrop of the forest.

Oddly enough, I, too, am dealing with pregnancy. Academically. Not like Karen, who is breeding a child in her belly and will have to endure, for the next seven or eight months, her family’s fervent hope it may be a boy. What if it’s another girl? Here she is, her first daughter a beautiful teenager of mixed race, clearly even more confused about her identity than other fifteen-year-olds, and those blonde, rather unattractive twins. It would be better for all concerned if her next child was a boy.

I have never been pregnant, except possibly once for about eight hours, when Ciaran was too stoned to use the condom properly and I rushed off for a morning-after pill. I still feel about pregnancy and motherhood the way I felt about them when I was fourteen: I assume they will one day happen to me, but they would be unthinkable right now. While my mother went from dread that her daughter might get knocked up in college to the explicit appeal Not To Leave It Too Late, my own feelings on the subject have not changed at all. Have not matured at all, Mom would say if I gave her half a chance. Maybe she is right.

“Hey!”

A breathless form materializes in the dusk just as I’m about to step up to my porch.

“Jules! You startled me!”

“Sorry, sorry!” She is quietly panting. “I just wanted to say sorry about the other day. About the soda.”

“That’s okay. No harm done.” I feel sorry for her, but the last thing I want is to encourage her to make me her Agony Aunt. I briefly touch her shoulder to make up for the neutral tone of my voice, and her face clears.

“So we’re okay?”

“Yes, Jules, we’re okay. Don’t worry. Good night!” I leave her standing in the dusk and firmly shut the door behind me.

For the first time since I fanned them out in a corner of the study, I go to squat over the medical textbook illustrations that I will talk about at a conference on Medieval and Early Modern Iconography at Notre Dame University in November.

My subject is drawings included in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works on anatomy; the first verisimilar images of dissected human bodies ever to be made in Western Christian culture. Nearly everyone who first sees them goes “Ewww!” because these are no naïve, symmetrically schematic drawings. These are the walking dead who display the functions of their bodies with a lack of self-consciousness that is both grotesque and graceful: a muscleman who—the better to show off the play of his limbs—has flayed himself and is holding the knife in one hand and his own skin in the other; a skeleton that leans nonchalantly against a pedestal, its ankles crossed and elbows bent to allow the viewer to see its joints. Naked females, depicted in the pastoral or urban settings of classical antiquity, their legs lasciviously spread and their abdominal walls peeled away like negligées, who display their reproductive organs complete with little mannikins huddling in their wombs.

These dissected pregnant ladies—and the web of iconographic codes and biblical symbols in which they are embedded—are my main focus of research at this moment. I have a feeling that Pop Walsh, if I tried to explain my fascination, would laugh me out of town, and Karen would smile politely and count the weeks and days of her own term. We do live in very different worlds, but that does not mean we cannot share a tomato salad and a beer occasionally.

It is still warm, and I go to bed with the window open to the forest’s sounds of silence.