“That would be lovely. When we get back. I want to take you on an adventure, Christina.” She strides over to the range and lifts the blue teakettle, inspecting the bottom. “Aha. I thought as much. This old thing is on the verge of rusting through. Let’s get you a new one.”
“It doesn’t even leak, Bets. It works just fine.”
She laughs. “This whole house could fall down around your ears and you’d still say it’s just fine.” She points at my shoe. “Just look at how worn that heel is. And have you seen the moth holes in Al’s cap? Come on, my dear. I’m taking you to the department store in Rockland. Senter Crane. They have everything. And don’t worry, I’m buying.”
I suppose, in some abstract way, I’d noticed the rust on the teakettle. And the shaved heel of my old shoe, and the holes in Al’s cap. These things don’t bother me. They make me feel comfortable, like a bird in a nest feathered with scraps. But I know that Betsy means well. And truth be told, she seems to need a project. “All right,” I relent. “I’ll come.”
Betsy and Al help me into the station wagon in the drizzle and get me comfortably situated, and then we set off down the long drive to Rockland, half an hour away. At the first stop sign she reaches over and pats my knee. “See? Isn’t this fun?”
“It makes you happy, doesn’t it, Bets?”
“I like to be busy,” she says. “And useful. I think those are pretty basic human desires—don’t you?”
I have to ponder this for a minute. Do I? “Well, I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Idle hands . . .” she says.
“The devil’s playground. Is that what you think?”
She laughs. “My Puritan ancestors certainly did.”
“Mine too. But maybe they had it wrong.” I gaze out the windshield at the fat raindrops that land on the glass only to be whisked away by the wipers.
Betsy glances at me sideways and purses her lips, as if she wants to say something. But instead, with a slight tilt of her chin, she looks back at the road.
OVER LUNCH ONE day—split pea soup with ham, on a blanket in the grass—Betsy tells Al and me that Andy’s father doesn’t approve of her. He objected to their engagement, warning Andy that marriage would be a distraction and babies even worse. But she doesn’t care, she says. She finds N. C. arrogant, bullying, presumptuous. She thinks his colors are gaudy and his characters cartoonish, calculated for the marketplace. “Billboards for Cream of Wheat and Coca-Cola,” she says disdainfully.
While she’s talking I watch Andy’s face. He’s gazing at her with a bemused expression. He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t protest either.
Betsy tells us that Andy needs to differentiate himself from his father. Take himself more seriously. Push himself harder. Take risks. She thinks he should limit his palette to starker colors, simplify the composition of his images, sharpen his tone. “You’re capable of it,” she tells him, putting her hand on his shoulder. “You don’t even know your own power yet.”
“Oh, please, Betsy. I’m just dabbling. I’m going to be a doctor,” Andy says.
She rolls her eyes at Al and me. “He just had a one-man show in Boston and won a prize. I don’t know why he thinks he’s going to be anything but a painter.”
“I like the study of medicine.”
“It’s not your passion, Andy.”
“You’re my passion.” He wraps his arms around her waist, and she laughs, shrugging him off.
“Go mix your tempera,” she says.
MOST MORNINGS ANDY rows over by himself in a dory from Port Clyde, half a mile away. On the way to the house, swinging a tackle box full of paints and brushes, he ducks into the hen yard and emerges with half a dozen eggs, cradling them in one hand like juggling balls. He comes in the side door and chats with Al and me for a little while before heading upstairs.
Andy’s eye is drawn to every cracked or faded implement and receptacle and tool, objects that once were used daily and now exist, like relics, to mark a way of life that has passed. Through his perspective I see familiar things anew. The pale pink wallpaper with tiny flowers. The red geraniums blooming in the window in their blue pots. The mahogany banister, the ship captain’s barometer in the foyer, an earthenware crock on a shelf in the pantry, the blue pantry door scratched by a long-ago dog.
Some days Andy takes his sketch pad and tackle box to the shed, the barn, the fields. I watch from the kitchen window as he roams the property, loping unevenly down the grass to peer at the words on the headstones in the cemetery, sit on the pebbled shore, gaze at the sudsy waves. When he comes back to the house, I offer him sourdough bread from the oven, sliced ham, haddock chowder, apple skillet cake. He settles on the stoop in the open doorway, cradling a bowl in one hand, and I sit in my chair, and we talk about our lives.
He’s the youngest of five, he tells me, with three doting sisters. A twisted right leg and a faulty hip kept him from walking properly as a child, from taking part in sports; you’ve probably noticed my limp? He was plagued with chest infections. His father was his only teacher. Kept him out of school, apprenticed in his studio. Taught him all about the history of art, how to mix paints and stretch canvases. “I was never like the other kids. Didn’t fit in. I was an oddball. A misfit.”
No wonder we get along, I think.
“Betsy’s told me a lot about you and Al,” Andy continues. “How Al chops firewood for everybody on the road. And you make dresses for ladies in town, and even quilts.” He points to the tiny flowers on my sleeve. “Did you embroider these?”
“Yes. Forget-me-nots,” I add, because it’s a little hard to tell.
“Interesting, isn’t it, what the mind is capable of,” he muses, stretching out his hand and flexing his fingers. “How the body can adapt if your mind refuses to be bowed. Those intricate stitches on the pillowcases you gave us, and here on this blouse . . . It’s hard to believe your fingers can do the work, but they can because you will them to.” He takes his empty bowl to the counter, swipes a slice of apple cake from the skillet. “You’re like me. You get on with it. I admire that.”
IN SKETCH AFTER sketch Andy focuses on the house. Silhouetted against the sky, a blot of smoke rising from a chimney. Viewed from a drainpipe, the cove, the eye of a seagull overhead. Alone on the hill or surrounded by trees. As large as a castle, as small as a child’s playhouse. Outbuildings appear, disappear. But there are constants: field, house, horizon, sky.
Field, house, horizon, sky.